This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time but didn’t know how to start. I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways. (I didn’t know how to draw maps to look like Google Maps but it’s pretty easy.) Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before (they are included in my Unbuilt Highways Map of NYC) but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context (also I’m sure there are plenty of people who didn’t even know about these). We have become so accustomed to viewing the world through Google Maps (or some other online mapping software) that I feel like these maps are starting to shape our view point of the city.
A map, after all, is a representation of reality with certain things omitted (or in this case, added). As mapping software becomes even more ubiquitous now that they are in the palm of our hands (Blackberrys, iPhones, etc), I think it will become all too easy for people to just accept what they see as reality. This is a dangerous prospect but one I think can be taken advantage of when trying to communicate certain information, such as what a neighborhood you know pretty well would look like with an elevated highway slammed through it. This was true for me, at least, while I was making these; Hand erasing buildings through SoHo, TriBeCa, and the LES was an eery experience as I tried to imagine what these places would really look like if my brush was a bulldozer.
And thus I began to understand the failing of Robert Moses (well, this one anyway). He didn’t drive and lord knows he didn’t think much of these areas which he tossed off as “slums”. There is a famous image of a young Moses standing in front of a map of the entire city:
What you need to be aware of when you are looking at a map is how it lies to you; it is a seductress. You think because it represents reality you can better understand reality, which is true only to a point. But when combined with the power and ambition of Robert Moses the maps seduction warped him and let him think that a line across the map represented far less chaos and destruction than he perceived. Adjusting lines on a map is easy and because a map is a visual design adjusting lines seems like a good way to clean up the map. But the lines on a map hide the fact that they represent something real, a street that needs to be moved, houses that need to be knocked down, families and businesses that need to be kicked out. I’m not saying that Moses wasn’t aware of these things, in fact he was keenly aware. But it was so easy and sexy to clean up the map that he was willing to do whatever it took to draw his maps to be permanent.
Thank for creating these images.
Have you considered doing one for the tunneled version of the Mid Manhattan Expressway rather then the elevated version?
I hadn’t thought of it but I think the map would look pretty much the same.
Wonderful maps. I really appreciate your work on these maps. I read about Moses many years ago, and how the Cross-Bronx and other projects of his really hurt the City more than helped it. Thanks for putting a new perspective on things!
Now for the street view
[...] bias. As the State Senate debates the MTA’s future, design blog Vanshnookenraggen recently reimagined Manhattan in the image of Moses. Using Google maps and some imaging software, Vanshnookenraggen pictured the city as it would be [...]
Love the MBTA maps and Moses maps. I’ve been sketching these in my bedroom for years, but your artistic ability far surpasses mine. How about showing us the Bushwick expressway? I could use that on the way to JFK, for sure.
Thanks! That’s on the to-do list along with the fully built Sheridan Expressway in the Bronx.
unless I missed it, you didn’t include the highway he planned from the Rockawas to Montauk. Only two miles, four-laned with a grass island in the middle, were built, rnning from 103rd to 73rd St., in Rockaway Beach, where it is called the Highway to Nowhere.
If you are talking about the Shore Front Parkway then I did include it, though I didn’t extend it out to Montauk. Guess I hadn’t head about that part.
I write about different ways of reorganizing history and knowledge, the “what ifs” that pepper the landscape, also the if onlys. (I’m a mapmaker and author.) Stubbornness and parochialism for once worked to NY’s advantage. Haussmann’s Paris was an improvement, but Moses would have destroyed NY.
I should add that this same seduction of the planner’s drawing or model also works on people through architect’s drawings, now done magically on computer. A huge cold carbuncle of a building with no street level interest, cheap detailing and brutal scale can look awfully charming on a computer screen or on an easel in a public meeting. The one-touch changes and substitutions made on a computer model can also make a pig’s breakfast of a coherent plan. Beware the words “simple”, “improvement”, and “comprehensive”. I admire artistic genius and big ideas but each new big idea doesn’t make the previous one obsolete.
Moses left his mark up here in Buffalo as well, slicing into an Olmstead Park, among other things.
[...] I am impressed by these images of Robert Moses highways reconstructed (or I suppose in this case constructed) into google maps. It’s a form of experimental historical practice (we like that), and it always strikes me when someone goes to the effort to produce something like this. The author of these can be found here. [...]
[...] to result from the rush to construction. I got them from a very interesting urbanist blog called “vanshnookenraggen.” (Hat tip to Jeremy Sapienza.) They are hypothetical maps of Manhattan with Robert Moses’ [...]
[...] because of opposition from people along the proposed expressway route, but it didn’t stop Vanshnookenraggen from reconstructing Moses’ plan in Google Maps. [...]
From what I understand, both the Sara Roosevelt park and the St. Gabriels park were planned as right of way for the expressways. I believe St. Gabriels was even bought. Your map has the highways running alongside the parks.
No this is incorrect. Both parks were there long before any planned expressways and neither were to be used as ROW.
Cool and useful. How about one for Brooklyn?
Totally working on it.
Could you share a bit more information about how you created these images? Thanks.
I’d love to see a whole series of these things for other urban plans in U.S. cities that were never realized (like the inner beltway in D.C., for example).
So would I and that’s why I’m working on it.
[...] to document it all. Or so we’d like to think that’s the story behind Vanshnookenraggen brilliant mock-ups of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (above) and Mid-Manhattan Expressway in Google Maps. [...]
[...] anderem Planungen Robert Moses‘ in New York, die nie realisiert worden sind. Schaut man sich die Karten an, versteht man auch warum die Planungen auf Protest bei der New Yorker Bevölkerung [...]
[...] someone that has driven in Manhattan, I welcome the idea of a Manhattan Expressway. It literally takes 30 to 45 minutes to drive from one side of Manhattan to the other due to [...]