Maps, graphics, and geography of Greater Boston. @bostonography
Well, you knew it was coming, right? How could we pretend to be a blog that has “Boston” in its title without eventually mapping something about the Red Sox? The fact is, we couldn’t.
So, here it is: a map of radio broadcast signals in the Northeast for stations that cover Red Sox and Yankees games. A more thorough blog post will follow. But for now, check out the Boston Sunday Globe or a slightly higher resolution version here.
Go Sox.
Fair warning: some day I am going to post long, questionably logical rants and ramblings about boundaries. I have a thing for—actually, against—boundaries invented by humans and what they do and don’t, and should and shouldn’t mean.
This is not that post, but given my interest I was glad when Ryan Sullivan pointed us to some nice work he recently did for ArchitectureBoston magazine. Titled Redraw, Reboot, his maps (and accompanying text by Elizabeth S. Padjen) examine municipal boundaries in the Boston area and all of Massachusetts, then re-invent those boundaries in a few different ways.
Municipal boundaries are essentially arbitrary, or sometimes based on centuries-old roads and landmarks, and today do not necessarily represent any culturally or physically meaningful entities. The Redraw, Reboot maps present some alternatives bases for municipalities that encourage us to think about how we divide ourselves and how we gather together. The new maps are these:
TownMeetingships Municipalities reorganized into populations of fewer than 6,000 residents to enable traditional town hall meeting governance
HouseTowns Municipalities reorganized by electoral districts in the Massachusetts House of Representatives
EcoTowns Municipalities organized into areas with similar geology, physiography, vegetation, climate, soils, land use, wildlife and hydrology
TownSheds Muncipalities reorganized based on watersheds
And, obviously:
Donutowns Municipalities reorganized based on nearest Dunkin’ Donuts store (boundaries determined by running the voronoi theorem based on store locations)
Grab the maps and article from the ArchitectureBoston site, and see more at Mr. Sullivan’s site. (Check out his other work while you’re there!)
If you hang around cartography circles enough you’ll run into this kind of thought exercise, but usually with regard to states, for example the 38 States or 50 states of equal population. Basing states on watersheds also rings a bell from a NACIS conference in recent years. It’s interesting to see something similar applied to a local level where our everyday lives take place. I’ll save my rants on the topic for another day, but in the meantime, just think about it: what, if anything, does that line on the map really mean?
In spite of the borderline comical duplication of street names in the Boston area (often within the city of Boston itself), the streets around here are named for many people, places, and things. They are names we encounter every day but rarely think about. Some time ago I heard the idea of making a map indicating the origins of all these street names. It can be a pretty ambitious undertaking for any place… unless someone has already done all the research.
Luckily in my current home, Cambridge, someone has. In 1978 Christopher Hail began assembling what is now a fairly mind-blowing database of the history of pretty much every Cambridge street and building, past and present. It’s truly a heroic effort. If you know Cambridge at all, do yourself a favor and lose several hours looking through it.
I’ve gone through Mr. Hail’s history of modern Cambridge streets and attempted to categorize them by what they are named for. Here’s a resultant set of maps.
The categories I settled on are briefly described below. It should be noted that there is a small amount of guesswork here; some name origins are uncertain, and not every street fits perfectly in my categories.
The idea here was to look for patterns in the street names, but it turns out there are not many patterns. A large majority of streets are named for people, often a local landowner or a military figure—perhaps to the surprise of outsiders, Cambridge streets aren’t all named for Bolshevik heroes. Apart from numbered streets existing solely in East Cambridge, the only thing that stands out in these maps is a group of streets using place names in the Area 4 (at once a lame and awesome name, by the way) and Wellington-Harrington neighborhoods. Many of these are good old and New England names: Norfolk, Essex, and so on.
So there’s not so much to see geographically. Some temporal maps would be interesting, perhaps showing the streets in the order they were laid out, or even something based on the lifespans of the people for whom streets are named. In any event, this is a good point of departure for looking into the streets’ history. It can be a little fascinating. Thanks to tiny Norumbega Street, it’s how I learned that Vikings totally landed in Cambridge in the year 1000, by present-day Mt. Auburn Hospital.
Now who wants to map the same for Boston?
That’s right—it’s Memorial Day weekend. Most of us may not do much in the way of observing (or even noticing) this beyond partaking in the sudden and delicious influx of backyard barbecues (where the Sam seasonal is suddenly summery). And even if we do find ourselves in a grill-side conversation about the weekend, I’ve noticed that a lot of the time, the discussion is not about what people are actually doing to observe the holiday, but instead it is about how “no one” seems to pay much attention to why the holiday weekend exists. Inevitably, the people who point this out are the same ones who leave work early that Friday to take their first camping trip of the summer, or to hit the pool or beach (before its inundated with red tide, right?).
Well, if you live in Boston, and you aren’t too lazy, it may be easier than you think to pay your respects. Here is a quick Google map showing all of the cemeteries in Boston (at least according to OpenStreetMap, MassGIS and a little geo-sleuthing on the interwebs). Do a little panning around, and you’ll see right away that there are a good number of cemeteries in this town (to say and show nothing of those non-Boston features, of which there are quite a lot, including Mount Auburn in Cambridge and Watertown—”America’s first landscaped cemetery”). While it may not be immediately obvious which plots belong to a military service person, many cemeteries do have memorials dedicated to those who gave their lives for this country.
I look at this map and I think, “Gosh, it probably wouldn’t take much to drive through one of these, have a gander at all of those names, and all of those miniature American flags, and think about how it is that we’ve all gotten here.” It turns out, for those who live in Boston, it wouldn’t take much at all. Assuming you aren’t on a Boston Harbor Island without a cemetery (of which there are a few) or at the end of a runway at Logan, the farthest you can get from a cemetery (as the crow flies) in this town is under 2 miles.
Where exactly is this place that is farther than any other in Boston from a cemetery? Why, it’s the Boston University School of Theology Library, of course! At a whopping 1.77 miles from Mt. Auburn Cemetery, the folks hanging out in the BU Theology Library have the longest hike of anyone in town if they want to pay their respects this weekend.
Others may have a similar walk. Here is a map of 1328 named places (from GNIS) in Boston, each coded according to distance to the closest cemetery. Red is used when the places are relatively far from cemeteries, while blue is used when they are close (leaving oranges, yellows and greens somewhere in between).
Of course, this leaves out some pretty obvious ways to observe Memorial Day. You might, for example, visit a memorial. Perhaps we will map those next year.
One of my favorite Simpsons bits proceeds thus:
Hank Scorpio: Hammocks? My goodness, what an idea. Why didn’t I think of that? Hammocks! Homer, there’s four places. There’s the Hammock Hut; that’s on Third. There’s Hammocks-R-Us; that’s on Third too. You got Put-Your-Butt-There; that’s on Third. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot… Matter of fact, they’re all in the same complex; it’s the Hammock Complex on Third.
Homer: Oh, the Hammock District!
I use “____ District” as often as possible when the wares in question have comedic potential. Furniture is too ordinary to be funny in that context, but it does manage to bring the quotation to mind. Here’s why.
Shortly up the street from me in Cambridge is an unmistakable cluster of furniture retailers on Mass Ave, marked on the map above. It wouldn’t give me pause except that in my wanderings around town I seem to encounter odd pockets of ostensibly independent furniture stores all over the place. Where there is one furniture store, there always seems to be at least another one or two. It’s probably not a uniquely Boston-area phenomenon, but still, what gives?
One easy answer points to colleges, whose students are crucial to the life cycle of furniture: from store to apartment to curb to dirtier apartment, ad infinitum. The area above, for example, is close to Harvard. Allston similarly has a nice furniture district.
But that doesn’t explain a neighboring pair of stores in western Cambridge, or a group in the South End, or the lack of concentrated stores around Northeastern. Or, beyond the clusters in student areas, am I only imagining these Furniture Districts? Perhaps it’s simply the same thing as with, say, CVS and Walgreens, which deliberately open locations across the street from one another, for some reason favoring close competition.
I have mapped 200 hundred Google results for “furniture” using GeoCommons, where simple mash-ups are not made of horribly ugly pushpins*. Take a look (or search Google yourself), dear readers—is there anything to this, and if so what do you think is behind it? A caveat, by the way, is that something’s appearance in these search results does not necessarily mean it’s a furniture retailer; it is, after all, a simple keyword search.
*This, I will boast, is partly because my own company, Axis Maps, designed much of the mapping apparatus a few years ago.
Whether you blame it on cows, humans, or nature, Boston’s street network is very confusing to visitors and unseasoned newcomers. We cartographers can do nothing but delight in how lost you are going to get.
Thence spring my two minimal, sort of stylized depictions of street and traffic patterns in the central Boston area, reposted here from my blog. The first shows a series of “squares” around town and how they are anything but square; the second (here in a layout subsequently published in the Boston Globe, much to my thrill) demonstrates a few potentially bewildering traffic patterns imposed on the street network, indicating hypothetical (but realistically silly) short driving routes through several major squares. Boston’s street layout lends the city a type of charm that is hard to come by elsewhere in this country, and it generates those extra moments of satisfaction when you’ve mastered new parts of it. Whenever I see tourists studying maps, I always hope they’ll provide me a challenge by asking for directions. (Although when they do it usually ruins my day because I fail or don’t do better than pointing and saying “somewhere that way.”)
We can of course look to our old pal Kevin Lynch for a few words and images about the navigational challenges of Boston’s streets. Here, for example, is a sketch depicting how Mass. Ave., Boylston Street, and Tremont Street confusingly all intersect each other at roughly right angles.
Besides traffic difficulties, what else is going on with these squares?
Micro region
The city is like miniature region because the overall organization of streets is like what you’ll see if you look at a smaller-scale map and see how cities and towns dot the landscape with major roads connecting the dots (perhaps as is evident in the Mass Streets map from last month). In the urban area, instead of cities and towns we have squares and neighborhoods, and instead of highways we have a variety of surface thoroughfares. In fact, it’s pretty much exactly the same pattern; in the old days, some of what are now the squares and neighborhoods connected by city streets were different towns and settlements connected by a series of roads. Bit by bit neighborhoods (which often do have coherent street patterns within) filled the gaps, and Boston annexed some of the separate towns, until there was a rather solid central city with an interior web of streets running every which way.
The Unmapped Boston poster by Matthew Harless very nicely demonstrates how Boston is organized as a bunch of nodes and connecting edges. It’s also a handy resource for identifying many squares that you won’t find labeled elsewhere.
For a total nerdball and mostly meaningless approach to connected nodes, we could compare reality to the edges on a Delaunay triangulation of the squares. Here’s a garish section of my side of the river via this applet. A few actual streets are discernable among those edges, like Mass. Ave., Cambridge Street, and Beacon/Hampshire Street.
Macro mall
In a less grounded thought, I wonder if city streets can effect something like the Gruen transfer—a concept in shopping mall design in which supposedly intentionally confusing layout derails shoppers from their original purpose, leaving them wandering with glazed eyes and spending money all over the place. Boston’s street-level retail scenes may not literally provoke such spending sprees, but I can imagine the streets’ layout, sights, sounds, and smells spurring a similar kind of aimless wandering, even if it doesn’t result in shopping. Back at the broader scale, does Boston’s tangled web of streets and squares encourage exploration and discovery? At the very least it gets you lost and sends you all over the place—almost a literal tourist trap.
Identity
Anyway, the best thing about the wacky squares is the unique, strong identity of each. They’ve all got their own geographic, residential, and commercial character, and if you live near one it’s your square. And the charm, oh the charm of the confusing intersections and navigation from square to square instead of by compass directions. Whether you pick up a poster or a t-shirt of your local square, or simply say its name with pride, I hope you get as much of a kick out of Boston’s squares as I do.
It turns out that searching Google images for “Boston Easter map” returns, among other noise, maps of Boston nor’easters. Luckily today’s forecast looks better than that:
Happy Mappy Easter!
A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon this image. It shows the location of Sweet Cupcakes in Cambridge. When I saw it, I instantly decided to write a post about how businesses in Boston imagine the space they inhabit through web-based locator maps.
I must say, I was pretty excited about this idea. There was some potential there. Locator maps, the little graphics that show the location of a something within a larger and more familiar geographical context, have been used widely by businesses, newspapers, magazines and others for decades. But while newspapers and magazines may want to avoid cartographic editorialization on the flavor or feel of a story location, a business likely does have something to say about their place in the world. Much like the claim I made in the Boston’s Sketchy Appeal post (that hand-drawn maps reveal a personal and perceptual landscape), I believe that a locator map (even if inadvertently) reveals a number of things about the business that employs it. The style, scale and extent of the map all communicate how the business views its landscape. The way the map is generalized also reveals something about what the business values in its environment. So, you would think that most businesses would want their locator maps to be unique and clear.
But my initial search for web-based locator maps was mostly fruitless. I checked web sites of local book stores, coffee shops, bowling alleys, restaurants, &c and—without fail—every establishment chose to use some form of web map (mostly Google or MapQuest) rather than design their own locator graphic. It seems that, in many cases, the convenience and supposed whiz-bangery of web maps has trumped the appeal and personal touch of a custom-made locator map. In other cases, a compromise between web map and personal touch is reached. The image above, taken from the Jackrabbit Design contact page, places the company logo (rather than a default Google-style pushpin) inside a comic speech bubble which has been placed upon a Google Map. I quite like this image because of what it represents. It brings to mind ideas that teeter between web map blandscapes and a lush and vibrant landscape which is inhabited by designers (Google did not design that sweet logo!).
In many ways, the Jackrabbit Design map sums up the zeitgeist of graphic design on the GeoWeb. You know that awkward phase we all went through growing up? You should—you’ve spent your adult years slowly weeding the evidence out of family photo albums. Well, that is the phase that design is going through on the GeoWeb now. And it seems a quick survey of business locator maps in the Boston area prove it.
As is the case with sketch maps, however, all is not lost. While businesses of all sorts, sizes and locations are turning to web maps to provide locational information to their clientele, there is one industry that is more-or-less holding strong: Graphic Design. And thank goodness they are, because who else would we want making our maps? (Um, well, other than cartographers, I suppose). Above is a classic-style locator map that places the offices of Carter Halliday in a landscape of downtown Boston that—while not overly emotive—is clearly imagined by the business, not Google, Bing or MapQuest.
For businesses that don’t want their clientele to rely a custom locator map for navigation, there is a simple solution: provide a link. This compromise is implemented by many design firms in and around Boston; the custom map, when clicked, takes the user to a web mapping platform for more locational and navigational information. The image above is taken from the contact page of the Boston-based firm Fathom Information Design. Their choice of locator map clearly communicates the firm’s impression of Boston as a city rich with spatial and historical information that is largely absent on a typical web map. What’s more? When clicked, the user is redirected to the firm’s location on a Google Map. It’s the best of both worlds.
Another (obvious) opportunity that design firms have when creating a locator map is to… well, show off their design skills. This locator map, taken from the contact page for Fresh Tilled Soil, does just that. In addition to giving users an idea of how this company imagines its surroundings (the Charles River and mammoth historical architecture play some role in their spatial identity, not pushpins or mottled satellite imagery), they have given potential clients a taste of their graphic communication style. In other words, this image says, “We can do the job without relying on a someone else.”
And that’s the truth. These design firms do not need to rely on Google or MapQuest or Bing or Yahoo for their locator maps. They are more than capable of creating better maps for representing their location (for example, see what Hunt & Gather has done above). Don’t get me wrong, the major web mapping platforms have their place (gosh, that’s an awkward word choice here) and are increasingly being developed with design acumen. But the web mapping giants are a product of an one-size-fits-all web; their implementation of cartographic design is not (as of yet) place or space-specific. They create an impression of space that shows New York and Lesotho using the same palette, while we all know the world doesn’t look the same everywhere.
So, bravo to the Boston-based businesses (like Verndale, above) that have designed their own locator maps and given us an impression of how they perceive their place in the world. When web-based cartography grows out of this awkward phase (and, believe me, it will), we will have them to thank for pushing back against the idea of a global landscape of homogeneity.
New York, New York: The greatest town in the universe. You just can’t beat a town with a baseball team so classy that it wears pin-stripes and hotels so expensive that literally no human being can afford to stay for an evening. Really, New York has everything that Boston has to offer and more.
So, Andy and I have talked it over and we’ve decided that Bostonography has run its course. Sure, it was quaint, vaguely European and laced with forced references to educational institutions just outside of town. But, frankly, New York is better. I mean, Boston? Really? It’s actually pretty cute that we even thought for a moment that Boston could compete with the world capital that is New York City.
So, this was Bostonography. And thanks for checking it out while it was, despite Boston’s inevitable fate as a second tier city.
Now, this is New Yorkography. And thanks for joining us! Come back often, Tweet it up and tell your friends. We’ve graduated to a real city, one with a park larger than Monaco, over 25% of the world’s gold reserve and nearly four times more World Series titles than cute little Boston.
Here is just a sampling of why New York is so much more awesome than Boston. Boston has neighborhoods. Bah! They are so pedestrian that no one has bothered to formalize their boundaries. New York has boroughs and they are all better than Boston’s neighborhoods. Just look at them.
And, yes, that graphic is to scale.
ps. April Fools!
Ah, the venerable street map. It is, perhaps, the most common type of map out there in a world of people in motion. From highway atlases to Google Maps, many a map, no matter how complex, is fundamentally designed around streets and the function of finding a way from Point A to Point B via road travel. But to achieve this purposes a street map is never literally just a map of street layout—hierarchies, labels, auxiliary features, and more make it possible. In order to be useful, the design of a street map really doesn’t show you an overall street layout very well.
A beautifully notable alternative is local hero Ben Fry’s All Streets map, which is a marvelously simple map of every street in the lower 48 states. It’s one of my favorite maps for sure, so naturally when I began trying to become acquainted with rendering maps of OpenStreetMap data, one of the first things I attempted was to totally reFry the idea at a more local scale.
So there is every street in Massachusetts according to OpenStreetMap. Click the image or right here for a tiled version where you can zoom into the map.
The simple presence or absence of streets can imply a number of things, not the least of which is the shape of the land. The coastline and islands are pretty clear. Population distribution is easy to infer, too. In the scale seen above, it’s obvious where population is dense and where it is relatively sparse. Or see the connections between places, for example following the march of towns along Route 2.
Such a map, I think, reveals the chaotic beauty of roads in Massachusetts, at times loved and at times hated. In the distant view there is no orderly geometry to be discerned, and certainly no straight lines. It’s very organic; there are many nodes scattered about with roads connecting them in a tangled web. Zoom in and you might find some of the infamous squares where roads collide from many different directions. All told, you can see why travel by road can be frustrating, confusing, and fraught with delays; but at the same time you can see what lends this fine state and its fine cities a special charm. The streets alone make every place feel unique in a way that isn’t felt amid, say, the rectangular survey systems of the Midwest. You can travel these streets with the confidence that there is always some odd space to discover, and that there are no roads to nowhere.
What, dear readers, do you see in the streets of Massachusetts?
