Bureau of Spatial Intelligence

Bird's-eye-view Series: Warblers in Bryant Park

This small section of a New York City map published in 1879 by Galt & Hoy shows the site currently occupied by Bryant Park on the left and the New York Public Library to the right which was, at the time, a man-made four acre lake/water-supply system called the Croton Distributing Reservoir.

The bird silhouette is an American Redstart (Setophaga ruticilla), a type of migratory warbler that can be spotted in Bryant Park in the summer/early fall before it heads to the tropics for winter.  

THE SUN TRIANGLE The sides of the sun triangle point to the four seasonal positions of the sun at solar noon in New York. The shortest bottom side points to the sun's lowest position on the winter solstice at noon about Dec. 21. The longest point side points to the sun on the spring and fall equinoxes at noon about March 21 and Sept. 23. The steepest side points to the sun's highest position on the summer solstice at noon about June 21.

This unusually functional sculpture lives in the sunken plaza of the McGraw-Hill Building at 1221 Avenue of the Americas. It was designed by Athelstan F. Spilhaus, a geophysicist/meteorologist/dreamer/futurist/inventor who was an inter-disciplinarian after my own heart. His work (which includes heading a committee that urged the White House to adopt recycling in the 60s) is a reminder to investigate and question the context of things, especially the patch of ground you call home at any given moment. 

Consumers of immigration news reports should be forgiven if they, like me, sometimes find themselves under the naive assumption that migrants from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador simply appear at the US-Mexico border, ready to inspire social and political controversy. There's a fair amount of information on who these migrants are and where they come from, as well as an evolving understanding of why they're coming. How exactly they're getting to the border from their points of origin doesn't make it into the conversation as readily, perhaps as the result of a mistaken impression that this aspect of the migratory process doesn't much matter. On the contrary, the migrants' arrival represents the end of an extraordinarily difficult journey which has a tremendous impact on everyone from officials at Mexico's southern border to residents along the main passage routes all the way north to the borders of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

I wanted a basic understanding of the migratory network through Mexico and collected several visual aids to that effect, hoping to shine a small light on the complexity of this process.

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This Reuters graphic shows not only the main migrant routes but also maps population density, desert conditions and border checkpoints along Mexico's norther border. 

By way of contrast, this map from a 2010 Amnesty International report shows a more limited number of routes. It's not immediately clear if the change shows a quantitative increase in route options or a difference in methodology between the two visualizations.

This San Diego Reader graphic from 2012 helpfully breaks the routes into use categories and adds water routes.

Central Library, Huntington Beach, CA May 1975

Design by Dion Neutra

Assessment from the editorial page of the Daily Pilot, April 2, 1975:

Architect Neutra, following six years of planning and work on it, expressed how we felt about his building. Calling it a community cultural center, he said it was place to get involved in a personal way, as opposed to the way you feel normally about civic buildings.

Author Leland Cooley put it this way: "It's got great vibes." I overheard someone else say, "You drive out into the boondocks and there it is and you say to yourself 'Wow!'"

And then there's the Literary Heritage Garden, established and maintained by the Huntington Beach Branch of the American Association of University Women. From the pamphlet:

Purposes: "To bring the informational and cultural opportunities of the library through the walls of the building and into the landscape surrounding it"

Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations paints the Maps Section of the British Army as the real villains of the Irish occupation, since in anglicizing local names they voided the landscape of its history and legends. Yet if maps serve the oppressor, they can also play a role in the armoury of the oppressed. For every ‘official’ map, there are two, five, twenty possible counter-maps. In the Surrealist world map of 1929, countries are reallotted sizes concomitant with their importance to the overall Surrealist project. England, consequently, disappears, as does America (with the exception of Alaska), while Mexico, Peru and Easter Island assume giant proportions. The Situationists, for their part, redrew the map of France, replacing French names with Algerian ones. In instances like these, map-making, far from fixing a reality, becomes a wild proliferation of alternative ones, of possible worlds each one as faulty and fantastic as the next …