Get lost in the world’s most beautiful maps.
No screens. Just glows.
Plan de Paris,
1739
In 1734 Michel-Etienne Turgot, the
Prévôt des Marchands of Paris, got “professor of
perspective” Louis Bretez to walk around for two years and
sketch facades, orchards, libraries, hospitals, cathedrals,
boats, whatever flattered the city.
Royal Academy
of Sciences engraver Claude Lucas and his assistants carved
Bretez’s drawings into 21 brass plates.
In 1739,
five years after Turgot commissioned the map, prints made from
Lucas’s engravings were bound and presented to King Louis XV
and members of the Royal Academy of Sciences. The books are
still floating around libraries; the plates live in the
Louvre.
The tiled plates make an enormous and
detailed birds-eye map. Every inch of this 4x6-foot
illuminated reproduction is beautiful. The quotidian is drawn
with the same care as the grand; market gardens and single
trees got just as much attention as Notre-Dame.
To
note: southeast is up, so the left and right banks are
switched. I couldn’t tell you why. Also the Seine is clogged
with boats and the roads are completely empty; a prettier
kinda commerce?
Plan de Paris, 1739
Lake Tahoe,
2020
Straddling the CA/NV border and nestled in public lands, Tahoe
is the largest alpine lake in the U.S. See desert, lake, and
forest simultaneously from the Heavenly Valley peaks, take a
swim, bring a tent to the granite slabs of Desolation
Wilderness (which is much more photogenic than it sounds).
The
map covers 2,400 square miles across four National Forests,
comprising 45 topographic maps; great cartographers dwell in
the USFS Geospatial Technology and Applications Center, where
they make the high-effort topo quads that the U.S. Geological
Survey stopped making in the 90s.
Tahoe gets all
the fame, but the National Forests to the west are invaluable:
those deep valleys to the west were carved by the North and
Middle forks of the American river, fed by Sierra snowmelt (a
portion of which is skimmed off for the Hell Hole, French
Meadows and Union Valley reservoirs).
As for the
Keep Tahoe Blue stickers on all Californian Subarus:
fertilizer runoff feeds the algae. Lawns delenda est........
Lake Tahoe, 2020
Angeles National Forest,
2018
Of all National Forests, the Angeles attracts the most
visitors: 19 million people live nearby and they all wanna
hike, ski, pass you doing 80 on a very narrow road, picnic,
tube down the creeks and dump their largest appliances in
same. Unlike the rest of SoCal, parking regs are unenforced
(there are like six USFS cops to cover 1,000 square miles and
they're busy with dumped bodies and car accidents).
I
was a temporary “1039” employee at Angeles National Forest HQ.
I made maps and wore the Smokey Bear costume exactly once. I
recommend a loop out of Chantry Flat and a climb to Mt. Wilson
observatory. Keep clear of the yuccas’ ice pick leaves. If
you're in a burned area, wear long sleeves and pants to keep
poodle dog bush away from your skin; it’s like a worse poison
oak.
Angeles National Forest, 2018
The City of New York, 1883
The Equitable Life Assurance Society Of The United States paid
lithographers Currier & Ives for a map that included their
building at 120 Broadway, a particularly handsome piece of
140-year-old spon-con.
Facing north from Battery
Park: steamships crowd New York Harbor, horse-drawn carriages
clop up Broadway, Central Park recedes into the distance,
agrarian New Jersey stretches west. 140 years ago the steeples
of St. Paul’s, St. Patrick’s and Trinity Church dwarfed the
commercial buildings.
The City of New York, 1883
New York City,
1977
Between 1884 and 1992 the U.S. Geological Survey drew 178,000
topographic maps covering the nation; the 1:24,000 scale “topo
quads” produced from 1945-1992 divide the entire country into
70-square-mile chunks. Nine of those quads comprise this map
of New York City.
It marks everything the U.S.
federal government cares about: major buildings, soundings,
ferry routes, neighborhoods, roads, rails, high and low
ground, buildings of temporal or spiritual authority, oil
tanks, lighthouses, power lines, survey markers, pipelines. It
makes a bad tourist map, marking all subway lines with the
unhelpful “TRANSIT” and doesn't say which bridges you can walk
on. At least it tells you the shapes of the forts.
New York City, 1977
San Francisco,
1915
105 years ago the Outer Sunset was just a hill, Treasure
Island had yet to be heaped into existence, India Basin and
SFO were marshes, and there was no cross-bay commute.
A
San Francisco for sea cargo, by sea cargo. No Golden Gate
Bridge, Bay Bridge, Dumbarton Bridge, San Mateo Bridge; to get
across you’d ride an Oakland streetcar down a 3-mile pier to a
ferry stop near Goat Island (since renamed Yerba Buena
Island).
U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps
used to be labor-intensive pieces of craft. Budget cuts turned
all the maps into database outputs, and now you’d never stick
a recent USGS topo on your wall. Bummer.
San Francisco, 1915
Los Angeles Vegetation,
2018
I’m from the Valley. My נפשׁ has five hues of bougainvillea,
ice-pick yucca, oleander sheathed in brake dust, a pink
peppercorn you probably shouldn’t eat, a pointier acorn than
you’re used to.
This map is my tribute to L.A.’s
plant saturnalia, where the sunlight, nitrogen and ill-gotten
water flow freely, where it never frosts, where the least
hospitable patch of asphalt is shaded by the largest fig tree
you’ve ever seen.
There’s no place like it; there
shouldn’t be another. But for now, stick your face in the
fence jasmine and take a deep breath.
Los Angeles Vegetation, 2018
Trees of the Tongass National Forest,
2018
The Tongass is the largest intact temperate rainforest on
Earth, a verdant paradise the size of West Virginia stretching
over way too many Alaskan islands, mist-wreathed peaks and
fjords and glaciers hemorrhaging water so blue it hurts your
teeth to even look upon’t, bears and wolves and black-tailed
deer and moose and salmon and “ancient murrelets” (a type of
cute bird) and 70,000 souls.
A National Park says
“Buy a keychain and please read our Interpretive Signage,
penned by three people with seven degrees.” A National Forest
says “We haven’t maintained that road since Carter; you’re
welcome to try your luck.”
Trees of the Tongass National Forest, 2018
West Coast,
2017
Best coast in Blender relief, NLCD land cover, a sunsetty
aspect, printed on polyester film and backlit in the largest
lightbox I could buy at the time.
Cities in brown
(as I remember them), the Sierras as in January of a wet year.
So much of upland CA is in a National Forest. Beautiful living
but for the wildfires.
West Coast, 2017
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