Louisiana Topos Now Available

Over the last few years, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) has been working to scan and process its enormous printed map collection -- of U.S. states, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and U.S. trust territories -- to make them available as free downloads in electronic format (GeoPDF).

Over the last month, the topographical maps of Louisiana became available... with New Orleans topographic coverage dating from 1891-2009.

Access via:  http://nationalmap.gov/historical/index.html

Image above:  Detail of "New Orleans, Louisiana" Quad 1945.  Scale 1:250,000.

Transportation Leviathan

As the New Orleans Master Plan discussions currently involve the removal of the raised I-10 expressway through the Sixth and Seventh Wards, it seemed an appropriate time to resurrect some ephemera related to the initial grass roots effort focused on keeping the highway off the riverfront area.

Image above: Louisiana Council for the Vieux Carré. The Elevated Riverfront Expressway, undated flyer. Louisiana Research Collections, Special Collections Division, Tulane University Libraries.

Bibliophilia-topophilia

The Olde Towne Arts Center (OTAC) in Slidell, Louisiana presents a call for entries in a national juried exhibition for Artists' Books. The exhibition is entitled Topophilia: Love of Place.

 Entry postmark deadline: January 31, 2009
 Juror: Natasha Lovelace, Kennesaw State University
 Entry Fee: $25 for 3 entries
 For details, prospectus and entry form, please email:
 Charlotte@OTACenter.com

 Charlotte Lowry Collins, Director
 Olde Towne Arts Center
 300 Robert St., Slidell, LA 70458
 Charlotte@OTACenter.com
 985-649-0555

Tableaux Vivants: Street with a View

I am enamored of Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley's Street with a View, filmed in May 2008 along Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh's Northside.  Its reinterpretation with Google Street View just appeared this month.  

For a fuller description of the project, click here.

Urban Tapestries is a similar project that was conceived and developed by Proboscis with collaborators the London School of Economics, Birbeck College, Orange, HP Research Labs, France Telecom R& D United Kingdom, and the British Ordnance Survey.   The platform allowed people to build relationships between places and associated narratives, pictures, recordings, and videos.  The projects are documented in a variety of media, connected by spatial memories.   

The University of Massachusetts in Lowell recently applied for a new patent that will help individuals create two- and three-dimensional maps of information searches.  Digital results may be superimposed in an interactive visual interface designed to harness human spatial memory. 

A former colleague once told me the story of a highly regarded professor, who, knowing he was going blind, began to construct a building in his mind, an expansive multi-storied structure with many rooms.  In certain rooms, he stored certain types of knowledge. The pathways he took from one space to another were traceable, years of accumulated knowledge that once had occupied thousands of individual notecards were now retrievable by accessing these mental spaces.  To read more about historic "Memory Palaces" click here.

Read more in the TSA Library:  

Donlyn Lyndon and Charles Moore.  Chambers for a Memory Palace.  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 1994.  NA 737.L96 A3 1994

Photograph:  tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE is a Mad Scientist / d-composer / Sound Thinker / Thought Collector. Whenever he has the energy he devotes himself to "undermining 'reality' maintenance traps"— which naturally made him an ideal contributor for Street With A View! Also a maker of costumes, tENT made an appearance in his Bird Brain persona.  Street with a View URL: http://streetwithaview.com/scenes.html.  Viewed 24.11.2008.

Citywide Master Planning for New Orleans

Herbert Gehr, photographer. Seven members of the Omaha City Planning Commission holding a meeting in front of an aerial map of the city showing the Missouri River as they plot the position of 17 major projects to improve their city. LIFE July 1947 on Google [http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?q=maps+source:life&imgurl=00c7914bae61e84d]

The Times-Picayune reported on Saturday that New Orleans is a shrinking city, one that needs to develop "smart decline" strategies for its future.   To read more, click here.  Master plans certainly abound in post-Katrina New Orleans:  Citywide Master Plan, Orleans Parish School Board Master Plan, Archdiocese Master Plan, Public Libraries Master Plan.  To find the data for the planning, here are the main links:

New Orleans Master Plan [http://www.nolamasterplan.org/]

Orleans Parish School Board Master Plan [http://www.sfmpop.org/]

New Orleans Public Libraries Master Plan [http://nutrias.org/~nopl/foundation/noplmasterplansummary.pdf]

The next citywide meeting for the New Orleans Master Plan/Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (CZO) has been announced for 13 December 2008, to be conducted at the Behrman Gym, 2529 General Meyer Avenue.  This will be the fourth in a series of such meetings, and is intended to focus on the theme "How We Prosper."

Keep checking the New Orleans Master Plan website for future updates.

Allegory of a City (1921)

In 1927, the American painter Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) was first commissioned to visually document the Ford Motor Company's River Rouge plant, and thereby established his reputation as an architectural photographer. Seven years earlier, Sheeler had collaborated with photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) to develop an homage to New York City, a short film called Manhatta. Their work, considered the first American avant-garde film, has recently been digitally restored with a new score by Donald Sosin. To watch the pre-restored film via the Metropolitan Museum of Art's portal, click here. To see the new restoration, you need to go to the Museum of Modern Art November 14th or 15th.

The creation of the restored version -- conducted by Lowry Digital Images of Burbank, California -- was dependent upon the use of the earliest extant copy, a 35-mm duplicate made in England in 1949. According to the Library of Congress, nearly 80% of the American silent era films have either been permanently lost or the extant copy is in unrestorable condition.

Image above: Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. Film still from Manhatta (1921).

Maps and Models

I mentioned Professor Emeritus Yi-Fu Tuan in an earlier post, his importance as a humanist geographer and teacher. Recently a group of former students and librarians from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Geography Department began to make his "Dear Colleague" (1985-2008) letters available to the public via the portal here. See, for example a letter inspired by a lunch with noted cartography historian David Woodward (15 December 1985):

"A map is a two-dimensional model of reality. Or, as David puts it, a model is a three-dimensional map. Maps and models are both artifacts, but a model can be a feature in the landscape -- indeed, a monumental feature. In traditional societies, the house can often be interpreted as a model of the cosmos. The floor plan of the house, with its partitions and directional points, are a two-dimensional map of the cosmos. The three-dimensional house is a model -- a three-dimensional map -- of the larger reality of the heavens and the earth."

Photograph above: Marjory Collins, Camouflage class in New York University, where men and women are preparing for jobs in the Army or in industry, New York, N.Y. They make models from aerial photographs, re-photograph them, then work out a camouflage scheme and make a final photograph, March 1943. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. on flickr.

Highways and Neighborhoods

The transformation of live oak-filled public boulevard space along Claiborne Avenue into the roadway deck for elevated Interstate I-10 dramatically altered Sixth and Seventh Ward New Orleans, much as the routing of Interstate I-35 affected the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota and Interstate I-275 impacted West Tampa, Florida. All three areas were home to tight-knit, fiercely independent and mixed race communities. Rondo's identity as a neighborhood was nearly erased by the highway construction; today it is largely known through oral histories and individual memories. West Tampa is being altered once again, this time by I-275 expansion for Florida's burgeoning population of motorists. To read a blogger's perspective, click here.

Thirty-eight years ago, the New Orleans Tambourine and Fan Club, a neighborhood-based cultural organization associated with the Sixth and Seventh Wards, initiated a revitalization effort for the Claiborne Avenue Corridor. By November 1973, the Claiborne Avenue Design Team (CADT) was formed and began a three-year multi-disciplinary planning process to revitalize the corridor that involved architects, engineers, community members, and social scientists. Participants included Ashe Cultural Arts Center co-founder Douglas Redd (1947-2007) and musicians Alvin Alcorn (1912-2003), Harold Dejan (1909-2002), and Freddie Kohlman (1918-1990). The team focused its attentions on potential development between Poydras Street and Peoples Avenue, and published its comprehensive plan that included supplementary architectural drawings, graphs, maps and statistical data. The CADT I-10 Multi-Use Study may be found in Tulane University's Special Collections Division, Louisiana Collections [NA 9127.N46 C 55] and in the Hogan Jazz Archive.

At the time the team conducted its surveys of CADT area residents, 62.8% of those responding selected recreation for children as the preferred use for the land. When asked the question, "If you had the choice, what three things would you select for general improvement of your community," the primary responses were:

Recreation for children 25.8%
Better streets 24.5%
More jobs/employment 17.4%
Misc./other 6.7%
DK/NA 14.7%


Photograph above: Claiborne Avenue Corridor, July 1966. From CADT I-10 Multi-Use Study. New Orleans: The Team, 1976, p. 44.

This Place Matters

The National Trust for Historic Preservation launched an initiative to celebrate and protect distinctive places as part of its "This Place Matters" Program for Preservation Month, May 2008:

"The This Place Matters campaign is designed to help people share the place that matters to them, wherever these places happen to be."

Visit www.preservationnation.org/thisplacematters and/or register on the National Trust's website, www.preservationnation.org .

If you haven't read University of Wisconsin Geography Professor Emeritus Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes and Values (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974) [TSA LIBRARY GF41.T82] or his Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977) [HTML G 71.5 .T8 1977], I would highly recommend them!

If you've never heard of Yi-Fu, click here for a sense of his impact.

Cornerstones Project

National Public Radio recently featured a story about the new Cornerstones Project, a collaboration between Tulane School of Architecture's Tulane City Center and the Neighborhood Story Project. What is it?

"Cornerstones is an effort to document and advocate for the overlooked and threatened landmarks of New Orleans. With the input of New Orleanians (living here and elsewhere), Cornerstones will be the first ground-up approach to identify New Orleans’ impor­tant historical and cultural sites and we believe it will broaden our ideas about the types of spaces that are important to our city and why they are significant to us.

Generally in New Orleans, places have been designated as important landmarks based on their architectural significance or their role in official histories. We hope our featured cornerstones help you consider other ways spaces are meaningful to our communities, such as adding playful design and color to our streets, grounding cultural traditions, storing local histories, or offering a sense of neighborhood belonging. On this webpage (please see Nominate a Cornerstone), you will find our Cornerstones Nomination Form and we would like you to identify a place that in a similar way is significant to our city.

As nominations are submitted, Cornerstones, with the help of the Tulane City Center, will update our online registry (please see Cornerstones Registry) to feature the places you think are important to our neighborhoods and New Orleans. The online registry will include nominators’ written narratives, interview excerpts, photographs, and architectural drawings to illustrate the dynamic intersection of places and people that make our city unique.

The creation of a registry of everyday monuments and gathering places is essential in post-Katrina New Orleans, since demolition and redevelopment plans are not always sensitive to the ways in which our cornerstones keep our community environments and social and cultural networks intact. With your help, we also want to note threats to the vitality of nominated places, so we can advocate for our vulnerable landmarks, many that have made New Orleans worth coming home to."

Want to read more?

Coming out the Door for the Ninth Ward. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2006.

Bolding, Ebony. Before and After N. Dorgenois. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2005.

Dennis, Jana. Palmyra Street. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Jackson, Waukesha. What Would the World Be without Women: Stories from the Ninth Ward. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Nelson, Ashley. The Combination. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Wylie, Arlet and Sam. Between Piety and Desire. New Orleans: Red Rattle/Soft Skull Press, 2005.

Titles have multiple holdings in Tulane University Libraries. Check the online catalog (OPAC) here.

Coming Soon to the TSA Library:

Cornerstones. New Orleans: Neighborhood Story Project, 2008.