A traditional map can tell you which road to take but it doesn’t give you an emotional impression of the space around you. With this in mind, literature graduate and New Yorker, Becky Cooper, decided to compile a series of psycho-geographical maps of Manhattan created by the borough’s residents. The book, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and sometimes Hate) Story in Maps is the result: an eclectic collection of maps from the poignant to the humorous to the downright bizarre. It also includes submissions from more notable residents of Manhattan including Yoko Ono and Harvey Fierstein.
Blank maps
Starting from the very northern tip of Manhattan and ending up at the bottom of the Financial District, Cooper walked the length of the borough handing out hundreds of blank maps of Manhattan to strangers. She asked them to fill in the map with their own memories, to illustrate their personal relationship with this most famous of islands.
Cooper explains to Humans Invent why she decided to undertake this project. She says, “It started the summer after my freshman year when I was hired by a New York non-profit to make a map of all the public art in Manhattan. I was actually supposed to write the copy that went along with the map, but it turned out they hadn’t yet finished it so that became my nearly Sisyphean task that summer. In spending hours and hours placing those dots I was realising I was still making very subjective decisions no matter how thorough I was trying to make the map.”
Coupled with the realisation that a map could never be truly objective, Cooper observed that the little maps she had been making on napkins – directions from the office to wherever she was going on a particular evening – told more of a story than a traditional map.
She says, “Those maps were in some way a more honest portrait of a life in the city and therefore in some ways the city itself and instead of hiding the subjectivity of the map maker it celebrated it.”
Favourites
Our favourite map – being mad jingoists of course! – replaced existing areas of Manhattan with London boroughs in the most appropriate places. E.g. East London for East village and Hyde Park for Central Park. Our most disturbing was one entitled My Little Town Blues, with blotches of red and the word ‘struggle’ scrawled across the borough.
We ask Cooper to choose her favourite maps. She says, “I think in general the ones that affect me the most are the ones where people have figured a way to lay themselves completely bare but do it in a sort of visually effective way.”
One example she points to is the terribly poignant map of a man’s forty year love affair with a woman called Eve, which includes all the specific places that contain wonderful memories of her as well as the hospital she died in.
Contributors
From the notable contributors, Cooper points to the hilarious one done by New Yorker journalist, Patricia Marx, who marks the areas dotted around the island where she has lost gloves. The map is filled to the brim with hundreds of the mittens. In addition, she writes on the map, “Have also lost wallets, earrings, a zipper pull, umbrellas, virginity, mind, & copy of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time vol.1. But there is only so much I can draw.”
Memory maps: the secret A-Z by New Yorkers
