Fun With Maps Brooklyn-style
February 29th, 2008 by EthanThanks for visiting! Subscribe to the RSS feed, receive posts via email, or find other ways to subscribe in the 'Subscribe' box to the left. Thanks again and see ya soon.
I must’ve been a cartographer in a past life — maybe like Bob Balaban in Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind — because I am a total map junkie. I pore over them; road atlas, topographical, oceanographic, google, you name it; I hang them on my walls, plot road trips that may never happen, explore parts of the world I may never see.
So this is my map post!
This being the GREEN Brooklyn blog, I’ll start in the obvious place with my good ol’ friends Green Map, founded by Wendy Brawer in New York City in 1995. Publishing maps with local green resources for locations around the world, Green Maps has active collaborations in an incredible 400 cities, villages, and neighborhoods in 50 countries.
While I, of course, encourage you to go to GreenMap.org and check out some of the incredible green maps from around the world, I would be remiss if I didn’t feature the great green maps from Brooklyn!
First, and appropriately, Ft. Greene.
Green Fort Greene Clinton Hill Wallabout produced a wonderful centerfold Green Map in the November 2007 ‘green’ issue of The Hill, a publication about historic Brownstone Brooklyn.
Download the Green Fort Greene Clinton Hill Wallabout green map here (pdf).
Next up, Pedaling Brooklyn’s Gardens, a project of North Brooklyn’s Recycle-a-Bicycle.
In the summer of 1999, North Brooklyn Recycle-A-Bicycle focused on the
relationship between transportation and open space. Community gardens are unique open spaces, reclaimed from illegal parking lots and dumping grounds.
A small band of students and volunteers scoured North Brooklyn for gardens and talked to community leaders about their neighborhoods.
The Pedaling map is not available online, but if you contact RAB they may be able to hook you up.
I randomly picked up another cool map when I stopped in the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance office a bit ago and
met with some folks there — they do wonderful work for NYC’s waterways and to re-invigorate the idea of ferry transportation in the five boroughs. While I was there, 
I happened to pick up their great map h2o access. Neat stuff.
The map covers the Hudson Riverfront of New York and New Jersey including Manhattan, Hoboken, Weehawken, Edgewater, Bronx, Yonkers Westchester, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Jersey City and Bayonne. A giant table on the back tells you what activities are available in each place, whether there is parking or a fee, how to contact these places or visit them on the world wide web, and how to get there by public transportation.
Go get one (info at the bottom), and start planning some summer day-trips now!
A local (Brooklyn-based) non-profit that does great work with maps is Brooklyn Center for the Urban Environment — an org that provides urban environmental classes and programs for hundreds of classes and thousands of students in the NYC school system.
Some offerings in their curriculum include the Urban Design class ‘Environmental Mapping‘ “where students use maps to collect, interpret, and present information about human impact on the environment.” They also developed the unique Sound Map project where, “Erasmus High School students used technology, creativity and insight to map the sounds of their neighborhood. Listen to 15 different locations along Church Avenue, Brooklyn.” BCUE is also the lead partner on a great new charter high school called Academy of Urban Planning that does a good deal of mapping and, of course, urban planning.
Another cool map I stumbled on recently is a rockin’ 3-d map of DUMBO. Go to the link and check it out, but they have a new map that has more green details; like the Brooklyn Bridge Park, a cute little NY Water Taxi shipping commuters to Lower Manhattan, and a number of other new developments in DUMBO.
Perhaps the coolest of my map selections, Ork Posters makes neighborhood maps of a handful of cities (Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Manhattan, SF, and a 
bunch more coming out in Spring of this year). They just announced a special, limited-release screen print of the Brooklyn map with the Brooklyn tipster-zine Brooklyn Based.
In conjuction with the Brooklyn Based (the most original, hyper-local, borough-proud newsletter in fuggedaboutit Brooklyn), Ork has released a limited edition of 100 white on orange/gold paper. Don’t hesitate, these will go fast!
They’re probably already gone, but check it out and if they still got ‘em, get yours asap! To sweeten the deal, they donate 2% of all sales to a couple of great causes — River Action and HEAL Africa.
Lastly, can’t forget a mention of one of the coolest uses of google maps that I’ve seen yet, the Coney Island Interactive Development Map.
The map shows the Amusement District as it appeared in a recent aerial survey. You can use the square buttons in the upper left-hand corner of the map to move or zoom in and out. You can use the rectangular buttons in the upper right-hand corner to highlight streets or view a streets-only map.
Photographed locations are marked with Map marker symbols. Click on these symbols to see a description of the location and dated photographs illustrating how the location has changed over the years.
Very cool, go play.
So yeah, I told you I was obsessed by maps. I hope people enjoy this stuff as much as I do! Any other cool ones ya’ll got out there?! Leave your map tips in the comments…
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One Response to “Fun With Maps Brooklyn-style”
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March 3rd, 2008 at 7:48 am
Excellent! Thanks for pulling these together.
I share your love of maps. I use them a lot on my blog. I’m particularly fond of the OASIS Mapping Service, which lets you create your own thematic maps from publicly available information. And Google Maps provides for collaborative development of maps.
GIS is the next frontier in social networking.