Blog Posts by Subject: Geography

Gotham. The Big Apple. The City of Light. Crossroads of the World. And my personal favorite: the City of Superlatives. These are all sobriquets that have been applied to New York City at one time or another.

The city that has insinuated its way into the hearts of so many travelers has inspired an incredible outpouring of travel guides and literature.

Travel writing at its best is half reporting and half myth-creating by the adventurer fortunate to visit an unknown, perhaps exotic destination. These treatises offer a snapshot of a particular place and period of time, capturing the local culture, quirks, cuisines and curiosities. Travel essays are excellent guides for an 

What could be more American than the road trip narrative? From Jack Kerouac to Tom Robbins, Americans have penned accounts both real and fictional about the joys and singular boredom of the open road. The rolling hills and prairies, the breeze wafting in through the window, and the seemingly endless dots of small towns, roadside restaurants and gas stations all stem from a particularly American phenomenon: the Interstate Highway System.

Happy Thanksgiving from The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division! Come see Willem Janszoon Blaeu's Nova Belgica et Anglia Nova in person at the fabulous Mapping New York's Shoreline 1609-2009 exhibition, open today and the Friday and Saturday following Thanksgiving in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall located on the first floor of the Stephan A. Schwarzman Building.

Over the years, as we push more and more of our maps onto the web, such as Pieter Goos' Zee-Atlas, 1672, from which the below image was taken, we ask… ...what do we do with all this stuff? ...how do we make digital maps meaningful?

One approach is through our blog, where we highlight various places and themes depicted. Often there is much more to read between the contours, about, among other things the social, geographic and cultural mix from where the maps were generated; something we, in future posts, will take the time to illuminate.

Staff of the New York Public Library recently hand picked a set of nearly 500 images, collected from across our Digital Gallery, composing them as a curated set of images at the Commons on Flickr. They represent the Hudson River Valley through several hundred years of history and complement Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, now up in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

The first time I visited Cape Cod, a city boy unaccustomed to the ways of the natural world, I encountered what seemed to me one of the primal mysteries, the secret from which so much else in life sprang. Although I have witnessed this phenomenon again and again over the past twenty or so years, it mystifies me still. During that first trip, my wife and I made an initial foray to the beach on Cape Cod Bay and looked out across the magnificent body of water held in the cup of land stretching from Bourne to Provincetown and marked by a length of watery horizon that could not be encompassed by peripheral vision alone. We waded out into that gentle ripple of surf and could see, at our 

No, I'm not referring to Henry Hudson and his quadricentennial of "discovering" Manhattan and the river that's named after him. I'm speaking of Alice Hudson, Chief of the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, who retires this week after a long and glorious career at NYPL. She's someone who impacted many lives, leaving behind a shining legacy that will continue to glow for years.

I'll particularly miss Alice's wry humor. I still chuckle when I recall her telling me that she first wanted to title her upcoming exhibition (Mapping New York's Shoreline 1609-2009) "Hudson on Hudson." You could always count on her to tell it like it is. Her 

Last weekend I found myself in a truck stop in central PA with a fiendish problem. What to choose?

Louis L'Amour? A volume in an endless fantasy series? Or a grit-filled true-life testosterone-fueled story by a marine or a special-op or a terrorist fighter? Which book could I take to bed? What book could I count on to get me through the night when I found myself awake at 3 am?

After 165 years things are bound to change, even in the Village. Maps are a great way to see that change, and fortunately The New York Public Library has one of the world's great map collections. Here's a map of lower Manhattan when Edgar Allen Poe roamed the Village:For fun, compare it to my Google map:

Want to breakfast with Theodore Dreiser? Grab a cup of coffee at Grey Dog Coffee or Out of the Kitchen and mosey on down to 16 St. Lukes Place.

Hey, you’re right across from the Hudson Park Library! And just down the street at 14 and 12 St. Lukes Place are the former homes of Marianne Moore and Sherwood Anderson. They all lived here in the 1920s.

Use this map (I'll continue to add to it) to create your own coffee jaunt or late night crawl. You’ll be inspired by walking the streets of the literary greats. You might even write something! Or at least, stop by the Hudson Park Branch and take out one of their books, grab that coffee, and relax knowing that 

Panorama of Richmond, Staten Island, N.Y. [view from high ground with St. Andrew's Church] (From NYPL Digital Gallery)

Right here in zip code 10035 you can keep your child safe in your car. Just stop by Chevrolet-Saturn of Harlem on Saturday, April 11 between 11 am and 3 pm for a FREE safety check of your child car seat.

A trained car seat technician will check your seat and demonstrate correct installation. No appointment is necessary. DOT is sponsoring this event is in partnership with Safe Kids New York City and Chevrolet-Saturn of Harlem.

Chevrolet-Saturn of Harlem
2485 Second Avenue (at 127th Street)
Manhattan 10035

This FREE event will be held again on Saturday, May 9: same time, same place. Can’t make it on those days?  

Poets named for hospitals is a very short list.

In fact, Edna St. Vincent Millay is probably the only major poet who would be on such a list. Frankly, I can't think of anyone else named for a hospital, let alone a poet, and if you know of one, please let us all know in a comment.

Edna's uncle's life was saved by the staff of St. Vincent Hospital shortly before Edna's birth in Rockland, Maine -- consequently, Edna's middle name. Somehow this still seems odd. What if her uncle had been saved at Mt. Sinai? Columbia-Presbyterian?

Appropriately, Edna, or Vincent, as she liked to be called, came into her own in the Village, living in the famous narrowest house of the city 

I suppose April is National Poetry Month because it's the cruellest month. I don't know if that's true but I've planted some seeds and hope to have flowers for summer. Am I deluded by this into believing in a spring resurrection? Perhaps, but what's the alternative? I'll take my morning glories and moon flowers and if they smell sweet I'll try not to think of funerals.

April is a great time to drop by the Hudson Park Library and take out some poetry. Take your book, walk a couple of blocks to the Hudson River and doze off in the sun between lines by such great Village poets as Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Stanley Kunitz. April will not seem cruel.

Marianne 

What do William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and Kahlil Gibran have in common?

The all lived in the Village!

They may be the native sons of Mississippi, Ohio and Lebanon respectively, but for a time each of them called a piece of rarified Manhattan real estate south of 14th and north of Canal Street home.

The 125th Street Library announces our 2nd Annual 125th Street Poetry Contest (poetry slam!)

All are invited to submit entries, multiple submissions are encouraged, but only one will be chosen for entry!

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009: 4 PM

125th Street Library
224 East 125th Street
New York, NY
10035
(212) 534-5050

For more information contact John Fahs, Senior Young Adult Librarian. Images are from last year's event.

Although I have worked for NYPL for over 23 years, I never worked in a Manhattan branch before arriving at the 125th Street Branch in January. I’ve been exploring the 125th Street neighborhood from the Information Desk by looking at the local organizations listed in Community Board 11’s list of Community Based Organizations.

In order to stay truly local, I’ve (so far) limited my explorations to our zip code 10035. Fortunately, the 125th Street Branch is fairly well centered in this zip code. There is a program on Channel 25: “Cool in Your Code” that I think is a good title for what I’d like to make available to our users. Apologies to NYC 

This post is a revised and updated version of an article that originally appeared in The Staten Island Historian, Winter-Spring 2002, Volume 19, New Series 2 published by the Staten Island Historical Society.

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The Port Richmond Branch of The New York Public Library is rich with stories. It stands at 75 Bennett Street on the North Shore of Staten Island, N.Y., two blocks from the Kill Van Kull. A gift from the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, the historic red brick building faces Veterans’ Park and P.S. 20 in the Port Richmond neighborhood. The library’s history and its service to the people of Port Richmond mirror 

We've updated the Map Division's Google Earth index to digitized NYC map collections to include more than 2000 maps from 32 titles, organized chronologically and geographically (by borough), all published between 1852 and 1923. The map index (download .kmz file) requires installation of Google Earth on your computer. There are three recommended ways to search for maps using this tool.