110: Mapping
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Every year, about a half dozen people spend from late spring through early autumn, walking the streets of New York, making a map of every crack, every depression, every protrusion, every pothole, on every sidewalk of all five boroughs in the city. So, in this section we have cracks, we have depression, and we have a broken car. Ralph Gentel's looking at a crater the size of a manhole cover, he draws on a map he's carrying in the red felt pan. So that triangle would cover the fact that you have a depression there. So what you do is two triangles with a line in between them, another line, and then two x's with the line in between them, to indicate that the curve is all still defective. Under New York law, if you trip on the sidewalk and hurt yourself, you cannot sue the city unless somebody had informed the city beforehand that there was a problem with the sidewalk. No one told authorities to fix it, there was no negligence. And so, years ago, a group of attorneys simply decided to hire a map company to go out each year and chart every foot of sidewalk in New York. They turn in the maps to the city, which makes it possible for injured New Yorkers to do what nature apparently intended for them to do, which is, take their city to court. On the sheet, I would also look at the crosswalk, it's uneven, so we usually use some rectangles to suggest that. It's an unusual job. Ralph says that wherever he goes now, he notices the sidewalk. We stand at the corner of 44th and Lexington, the window of a health food store there has a big sign that says "juices in sickness" tells you what kind of juice you should drink for a long list of diseases, diarrhea, hypertension, impotence, hair loss. Ralph meanwhile is looking at a hole in the ground where some water has collected. And we have these cracks here. I'm just going to name some of the things that you're not putting on the map. There's a perfume and gift shop, there's a natural foods place, there's the passport photos place. In front of the perfume shop, there's a guy sitting on a crate trying to fix a gold watch. Not very well. And this goes on the map. No, no, no, it goes on the map. And this gets to the very heart of what map making is all about. Creating a map means ignoring everything in the world, but one thing, that one thing could be the bus routes or the air traffic control patterns, could be the homes of Hollywood stars or it could be the cracks in the sidewalk. Maps have meaning because they filter out all the chaos in the world and focus obsessively on one item. But this is the age of maps, though you might not normally think of it that way. Dennis Wood is a cartographer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Something like 99.99% of all maps that have been made have been made in the century. This century now. This century that we're in right now. What are those maps and what proportion of them do you think are the maps that most of us civilians usually use, which are just road maps to get us in one place to another? No, but you see, I think you've missed all the maps right off the bat, since you go to the road map because you've forgotten about the maps you see every night on television, the maps that litter the newspapers, the weather maps, the weather maps, the maps all over the magazines. Welcome to WB EZ Chicago and Public Radio International.
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