An upcoming exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit, “brings together an extraordinary collection of maps, plans, ephemera, and other materials to investigate how Bostonians have moved around the city in the past, present, and future.” Opens September 9 and runs until April 27, 2024. Free admission.
Tag: Boston
Leventhal’s Urban Atlas Explorer Atlascope Is Expanding, Seeking Sponsors
Speaking of georeferencing old maps, the Leventhal Map Center at Boston Public Library has a collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century urban atlases. Their Atlascope platform presents 101 of them in a web interface overlaid on a modern street map. The Leventhal is now looking to expand Atlascope’s coverage beyond the Boston area to towns and counties across Massachusetts, and is raising funds to do so (it can apparently take 60 hours to process one atlas). Details on sponsoring an atlas here. See their Instagram post.
New Boston-Focused Map Exhibitions at the Leventhal Center
Opening today at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases is an exhibition that explores street-level changes to Boston in the period between the Civil War and World War II. Media release.
Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases features rare materials from the BPL’s historic collection of maps and atlases alongside lithographs, photographs, and sketches of familiar local landscapes. Visitors will discover how the atlas collections opens up a world of fascinating stories, with vignettes including the city’s first African Meeting House in the heart of Beacon Hill, landmarks of leisure like the “Derby Racer” and “Giant Safety Thriller” amusement rides in Revere, public health infrastructure on Gallops Island in Boston Harbor, and many more.
The in-person exhibition at the BPL’s Central Library opens today; a digital version will follow online. Runs until 19 August 2023. A curatorial introduction will take place next Wednesday.
Meanwhile, a permanent exhibition, Becoming Boston: Eight Moments in the Geography of a Changing City, also opens today at the Leventhal: “In the eight cases of this exhibition, we follow the changing spatial forms of the place we now call Boston—from before the landscape carried that name all the way through the struggles, clashes, and dreams that continue to reshape the city today.”
See the Leventhal’s exhibitions page and their preview of 2023 events for more details.
Real-Time Transit Maps on Circuit Boards
Harry Beck’s original London tube map was inspired by circuit diagrams, so it’s only fitting that TrainTrackr’s tracking maps showing the real-time positions of trains on the London Underground and Boston MBTA are literally circuit boards, using LEDs to indicate train positions. (They also have an LED map showing rainfall data in the British Isles.) Prices range from £99 to £249 (US$149 to $315). [Mapping London]
Building Boston, Shaping Shorelines: A Harvard Map Collection Exhibition
Building Boston, Shaping Shorelines is a Harvard Map Collection exhibition going on now at Harvard Library’s Pusey Library Gallery. “This exhibition allows you to trace the projects to reclaim land and build the infrastructure that has produced a city out of a peninsula. Come learn how much of Boston is on man-made land and what impacts that has had and will have on the city.” There is no online version, but Harvard Magazine has a writeup. Until 1 May 2020.
Previously: The Atlas of Boston History.
The Atlas of Boston History
The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Boston historian Nancy S. Seasholes, came out last week from the University of Chicago Press. It features 57 full-colour spreads—for a complete list, plus some examples, go here—that trace the city’s history from the post-glacial period to the present day through maps, photos, illustrations and accompanying text from three dozen different contributors. (The maps are original to this volume: this is a historical atlas, not a collection of old maps, in case that needs saying.) Looks impressive and interesting.
Related: Map Books of 2019.
New Leventhal Exhibition: America Transformed
The Leventhal Map Center’s latest exhibition, America Transformed: Mapping the 19th Century, opened last Saturday and runs until 10 November 2019.
During the 19th century, the United States expanded dramatically westward. Immigrant settlers rapidly spread across the continent and transformed it, often through violent or deceptive means, from ancestral Native lands and borderlands teeming with diverse communities to landscapes that fueled the rise of industrialized cities. Historical maps, images and related objects tell the story of the sweeping changes made to the physical, cultural, and political landscape. Moving beyond the mythologized American frontier, this map exhibition explores the complexity of factors that shaped our country over the century.
As usual, there’s a comprehensive online version, which is peppered with acknowledgements of the very white, very settler-colonialist perspective of the maps on display. Which are, of course, justified, but as far as I can see they’re asterisks and asides on an otherwise unchanged exhibit.
New Exhibition at the Leventhal: Crossing Boundaries
A new exhibition opened at the Leventhal Map Center today: Crossing Boundaries: Art // Maps “juxtaposes contemporary works of art with selected maps from the collections of the Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library. These pairings and trios create dialogues that illuminate the crossing of the traditional boundaries of art and maps, and stimulate a fresh appreciation of both media.” Runs until 20 April 2019; if you can’t make it to Boston there’s an online version.
Update, 24 October: Here’s a writeup from the Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe on ‘Breathing Room’
The Boston Globe now has a writeup of the Leventhal’s latest exhibition, Breathing Room: Mapping Boston’s Green Spaces (which I told you about on Monday).
Breathing Room: Mapping Boston’s Green Spaces
Breathing Room: Mapping Boston’s Green Spaces is the latest exhibition put on by the Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.
Boston boasts some of the nation’s most recognizable and cherished green spaces, from Boston Common, to the Emerald Necklace, to hundreds of neighborhood parks, playgrounds, tot lots, community gardens, playing fields, cemeteries, and urban wilds. In this exhibition, you will learn how the country’s oldest public park grew from a grazing pasture to an iconic recreational and social center, how 19th-century reformers came to view parks as environmental remedies for ill health, how innovative landscape architects fashioned green oases in the midst of a booming metropolis, and what the future holds for Boston’s open spaces. As you explore three centuries of open space in Boston, perhaps you will feel inspired to go outside and discover the green spaces in your own backyard.
The online version is here. It opened last Saturday and runs until 23 September; for some reason the opening ceremony isn’t until April 3rd.
Norman Leventhal’s 100th Birthday
Last week Boston magazine marked the 100th birthday of Norman B. Leventhal. The real estate developer, philanthropist and map collector died in 2015; in 2004 he co-established the eponymous Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library as a public-private partnership with the Library. [WMS]
Boston Immigration Map Exhibition
Along with Regions and Seasons (previously), the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center is hosting another exhibition, Who We Are: Boston Immigration Then and Now, which runs until 26 August. “This exhibition compares the landscape of today’s ‘new’ Boston with that of over 100 years ago. The maps and graphics on display here show where Boston’s foreign-born residents originate from, and where newer immigrant groups have settled, while celebrating who we are, and the vibrant diversity that is Boston.” Text is in English, Spanish, Haitian Creole, Chinese and Vietnamese.
New and Upcoming Exhibitions
Open now and running through 26 February 2017 at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Center, Shakespeare’s Here and Everywhere asks “What roles do place, identity and travel play in his comedies, tragedies and histories? Explore these questions and more through maps, atlases and illustrations of Shakespeare’s time and beyond.” [Tony Campbell]
The Northwest Passage: Navigating Old Beliefs and New Realities opens 29 September 2016 at the Osher Map Library in Portland, Maine. [WMS]
Mapping Australia: Country to Cartography runs from 4 October 2016 to 15 January 2017 at the AAMU Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht, Netherlands. The exhibition “will explore the different representations of Australia. Alongside the VOC’s historical maps of Australia’s coast, drawn by Dutch cartographers in the 17th and 18th centuries, are striking depictions of the country in contemporary art works of Aboriginal artists that are derived from thousands of years of traditions.” [WMS]
Mapping Boston’s Bed Bugs
The City of Boston fields several hundred bed bug complaints a year. The Boston Globe has put together an interactive map showing every complaint made from January 2012 onward—1,822 in all. (The dots show date only, and the map doesn’t zoom in enough to out anybody specific.) [Leventhal Map Center]
What’s Going to Happen to the Boston Globe’s Marble Map of New England?
The problem with big maps—the Electric Map of Gettysburg, the B.C. Challenger Map—is that they’re exceedingly difficult to move when the time comes. Betsy Mason at All Over the Map reports that this is now the situation at the Boston Globe: since 1978 their headquarters has been the home of an 18-by-12-foot, four-ton marble map of New England that had originally been commissioned for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in 1953. But now the cash-strapped Globe is moving to smaller digs, and there isn’t room for the map. Boston’s a relative hotbed of map activity, so I’m hopeful it can find a home.