Speaking of Washington, the D.C. Underground Atlas is a project to map all the tunnels under the city: utility, transportation and pedestrian tunnels alike, from metro and water tunnels to the underground corridors connecting congressional buildings. The maps are presented as Esri Story Maps and there’s lots of accompanying text. The project is the brainchild of Elliot Carter, who is profiled by CityLab and the Washington Post: both pieces reveal one challenge in mapping the underground infrastructure of Washington—getting past security concerns. [WMS]
Running until 23 December at the George Washington University Museum, Eye of the Bird: Visions and Views of D.C.’s Past is an exhibition of bird’s-eye views of the U.S. capital. Two new paintings by Peter Waddell specially commissioned for the exhibition—large, delicately detailed oil-on-canvas paintings that took two years to finish—serve as its centrepiece; paintings and artist are the subject of this Washington Post piece. [WMS]
Wymer’s D.C. is an online collection of the hand-drawn maps, notes and (especially) photographs of John P. Wymer (1904-1995), who in a four-year period between 1948 and 1952 systematically photographed and documented the streets of Washington, D.C., taking thousands of pictures and drawing and describing the city, which he divided into 57 equal sections. The photos are displayed via an interactive map that overlays them over modern-day Google Street View imagery. The site is the brainchild of Jessica Richardson Smith, who as an intern stumbled across the Wymer collection in the holdings of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. as an intern and made the online collection part of her M.A. thesis work, and her husband, software engineer Thomas Smith. More at CityLab. See also Curbed, DCist, Forest Hills Connection and Washingtonian. [WMS]
First published in June 2015, Thrillist’s Real D.C. Subway Map replaces Washington’s Metro station names with “an accurate depiction of what you’ll encounter when you exit the train.” It’s about what you’d expect. [Curbed DC]
The U.S. military uses a huge floor map of Washington, D.C. to plan for presidential inaugurations, as the Tech Insider video above shows. According to this, it’s used by the Armed Forces Inaugural Committee, a joint-service organization that provides military ceremonial support. (See this U.S. Army article from 2012 about the 2013 inauguration, and this 2008 Pruned blog post about the 2009 inauguration.) [Tim Wallace]
That Soviet spies created detailed topographic maps of the world, including their Cold War enemies, is not news. Wired had a feature on the maps last year, and I’ve been aware of the work of John Davies and Alex Kent on the subject for more than a decade.
But for some unexplained reason interest in Soviet maps has had a bit of a resurgence lately. Elliot Carter writes about the Soviet maps of Washington, D.C., and their myriad little errors at Architect of the Capitaland Washingtonian magazine. No doubt they’ll come in handy with the new administration. And the deployment of the Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov through the English Channel in October gave rise to this short piece on Soviet maps of the U.K. The maps are also featured in the British Library’s current map exhibition: they’re the lede in this News.com.au article about the exhibition.
E.G. Arnold, Topographical Map of the Original District of Columbia and Environs, 1862. Map, 74 × 81 cm. Library of Congress.
The Albert H. Small Washingtoniana Collection at the George Washington University Museum collects historical documents and other items relating to the history of Washington, DC. The Washington Post has a profile of its patron, Albert H. Small, who donated the collection to the university in 2011, and the collection itself. Of interest to us is the collection’s maps of the capital city, including the Arnold Map of 1862 (above):
Published during the Civil War, the map’s detailed, topographical view of Washington included all 53 forts that guarded the city. Secretary of War Edwin Stantonordered all the maps confiscated lest they fall into Confederate hands. Small has one. There’s a 1671 map of Maryland, too, the second map of the colony ever published, and a 1904 map of the St. Elizabeths Hospital grounds.
“It’s probably the best map collection outside the Library of Congress,” Goode said.
The Small Collection isn’t online (its web page has very little to it); to see its holdings, you’ll have to visit the Museum. [WMS]
Platte grond van de stad Washington, 1793. Printed map, 8¾″×11″. DC Public Library, Special Collections, Washingtoniana Map Collection.
Last week, DC Public Library announced “the release of a century of historic Washington, D.C. maps in Dig DC, the online portal to DCPL Special Collections. These maps cover the District of Columbia and the region from the 1760s to the Civil War. To see them, head on over to the Maps: City & Regional collection on Dig DC!” Of the 8,000 or so maps in the library’s Washingtoniana Map Collection, 250 have been digitized so far; they’re working on scanning the entire collection. [via]
For another example of using fantasy map design language to create real-world maps, here’s the work of geography professor Stentor Danielson, who draws maps of U.S. cities in the style of fantasy maps and sells them on Etsy. Boston, Cleveland (above), Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Washington are available. His Tumblr. Via io9.
