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Mapping Boston
An informative—and beautiful—exploration of the life and history of a city through its maps. To the attentive user even the simplest map can reveal not only where things are but how people perceive and imagine the spaces they occupy. Mapping Boston is an exemplar of such creative attentiveness—bringing the history of one of America's oldest and most beautiful cities alive through the maps that have depicted it over the centuries.The book includes both historical maps of the city and maps showing the gradual emergence of the New England region from the imaginations of explorers to a form that we would recognize today. Each map is accompanied by a full description and by a short essay offering an insight into its context. The topics of these essays by Anne Mackin include people both familiar and unknown, landmarks, and events that were significant in shaping the landscape or life of the city. A highlight of the book is a series of new maps detailing Boston's growth. The book also contains seven essays that explore the intertwining of maps and history. Urban historian Sam Bass Warner, Jr., starts with a capsule history of Boston. Barbara McCorkle, David Bosse, and David Cobb discuss the making and trading of maps from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Historian Nancy S. Seasholes reviews the city's remarkable topographic history as reflected in maps, and planner Alex Krieger explores the relation between maps and the physical reality of the city as experienced by residents and visitors. In an epilogue, novelist James Carroll ponders the place of Boston in contemporary culture and the interior maps we carry of a city.
292 pages, Paperback
First published September 10, 1999
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136 people want to read
About the author
Alex Krieger
17 books6 followersAlex Krieger is Professor in Practice of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has been honored repeatedly as one of Harvard’s most outstanding teachers. Krieger is coeditor of Mapping Boston and Towns and Town-Making Principles and coauthor of A Design Primer for Cities and Towns. He is also a Principal at NBBJ, a global firm offering services in architecture, urban design, and planning. He is a frequent advisor to mayors and their planning staffs, and has served on a number of national and regional boards and commissions, including the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
June 13, 2017
It's all about the maps in this book. There are big beautiful glossy maps of Boston from throughout the centuries. But, there is also a tremendous amount of text accompanying these maps. First there is a very long a detailed history of map-making, which I'm sure would be enjoyable to someone who is into that sort of thing, but was for me, painful. Then, the book begins a very random selection of essays on historical topics and individual people that seems to be randomly ordered. While there is a great deal of interesting information here, it's just feels like an oddly assembled book. Still, those maps! Gorgeous! And a surprise appendix timeline of Boston land-making, which I loved.
December 24, 2012
The lack of organization between the various essays is this book's downfall. The essays vary greatly in quality and often end up repeating each other as they describe the physical history of Boston. A few feel as if they go off on wild tangents, such as the metaessay on the mapmaking industry of New England. Some provide fascinating insight into mapping and Boston itself, such as the essays on the fire insurance and government maps and the essay on the physical expansions of Boston.
Weak curating aside the star of the book and the reason we all checked it out from BPL is the maps. While small, they're printed at a high resolution - a loupe or magnifying glass is essential to enjoy this book properly. Overall I'd recommend the book just for the maps - skim the essays if you wish, but don't feel compelled to read them all.
Weak curating aside the star of the book and the reason we all checked it out from BPL is the maps. While small, they're printed at a high resolution - a loupe or magnifying glass is essential to enjoy this book properly. Overall I'd recommend the book just for the maps - skim the essays if you wish, but don't feel compelled to read them all.
March 26, 2023
Mapping Boston goes well beyond geography and incorporates sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and ecology in providing a compelling history of not only Boston and its growth, but of land-making, map-making, and publishing. With the help of an abundance of maps, engravings, paintings, photographs, and essays, Mapping Boston introduced me to many new concepts (such as “wharfing out,” the process of building wharves and later filling in the slips between to extend the coastline outward), more precise usages of cartographic (and cartographic-adjacent) terminology, cartographic techiques and navigational tools and their functions, and tidbits regarding variants of currency and standard trade discounts provided to map-sellers. There was a particular pleasure to learning about familiar streets and locales and the specific contexts which led to their development, just as there was to gaining an understanding of how curious current-day circumstances came to be and to learning about now-buried (or otherwise removed) geographical features and how they related to the known aspect of Boston.
Mapping Boston establishes early on the inflection points in Boston's history and its geography (the growth of its landmass reflecting times of prosperity), and this framework is the backdrop for all of the changes that are evident as one progresses through its pages. The fact that Boston comprises so much made land makes for one of many significant factors whose change is compelling to observe over time, and one can not only track the changes in the landforms themselves, but also in the refinement of the theoretical underpinnings of the maps, such as increasingly sophisticated projections and the development of better, more formal definitions such as that of longitude and its calculation; one also gets to see how the names assigned to places shift over time, and, as a result, to observe both the etymologies of familiar place names and the passage of territories from one people to another. The technology of mapmaking can be seen developing, too, along with the technology reflected in the maps, in the form of railroads, highways, and so forth. Layouts such as one comparing a two block–by–two block area on four different fire-insurance maps provide opportunities to track changes on a granular level, both in scope and in detail, as the changes in businesses on the blocks and the construction materials used in the blocks’ buildings can be seen across a span of 71 years.
The research and precise matching that made that possible—and the specificity of the result—is characteristic of the attention paid to details throughout the book, both in terms of how many are included and how carefully they are presented. The level of detail in the captions and the vignettes (which give helpful context to what is going on at a specific point of time or in an era more broadly) accompanying the maps matches that of the maps themselves; even there, outside of the primary essays that ostensibly constitute the main text of the book, all sorts of information is incidentally introduced, such as references to the renaming of streets, conventions of the map-making and map-selling trades, and little morsels such as the path along with map plates passed between publishers. The commitment to detail extends to additional material provided in the form of a timeline of Boston land-making, a chronology of Boston history relevant to its geography (including annexation of towns, construction of notable buildings, population growth, demographic changes, and historical milestones), and a very helpful and thorough glossary.
The authors are completists in crediting, and providing biographical details about, map-makers in the broadest sense, not only the cartographers, strictly speaking, but the editors, engravers, printers, compilers, and publishers. And rightly so, since, for all that information is provided in depth and abundance—and in an abundance of forms—in this wonderfully packaged volume, the gorgeous maps themselves are unquestionably the stars and provide the primary joy in the experience of reading Mapping Boston. I took such a simple pleasure in following along as the information portrayed becomes better and more specific, and at noticing names and conventions and styles going in and out of common usage (even a 1948 map, despite the disappointment of an increasingly utilitarian approach to mapmaking, still retains some stark beauty in its simplicity and its characteristic midcentury modern typeface). In their most ornate forms, the maps have a beauty and craft that extends beyond their primary portrayals to the cartouches or engravings (such as of significant buildings) around the edge that embellish them; flair is brought even to such details as the marking of a distance to define a map's scale, which in one case is positioned between the tips of a depiction of calipers. Many of the maps are neat examples of physical artifacts as well, such as maps designed to be overlays showing various stages of battles and maps appended with literal attachments to create a literal version of an inset by way of two distinct pieces of paper in combination. Pleasingly, Boston's proximity to water allowed for numerous examples of what were my favorite inclusions, hydrographic charts with all sorts of details—shoreline profiles, shoals, banks, channels, mudflats, currents, sailing directions, and a virtual web of minuscule depth soundings (a sort of counterpart to the nearly-as-pleasing reticulated extensions of compass roses that I always liked to see featured).
Mapping Boston establishes early on the inflection points in Boston's history and its geography (the growth of its landmass reflecting times of prosperity), and this framework is the backdrop for all of the changes that are evident as one progresses through its pages. The fact that Boston comprises so much made land makes for one of many significant factors whose change is compelling to observe over time, and one can not only track the changes in the landforms themselves, but also in the refinement of the theoretical underpinnings of the maps, such as increasingly sophisticated projections and the development of better, more formal definitions such as that of longitude and its calculation; one also gets to see how the names assigned to places shift over time, and, as a result, to observe both the etymologies of familiar place names and the passage of territories from one people to another. The technology of mapmaking can be seen developing, too, along with the technology reflected in the maps, in the form of railroads, highways, and so forth. Layouts such as one comparing a two block–by–two block area on four different fire-insurance maps provide opportunities to track changes on a granular level, both in scope and in detail, as the changes in businesses on the blocks and the construction materials used in the blocks’ buildings can be seen across a span of 71 years.
The research and precise matching that made that possible—and the specificity of the result—is characteristic of the attention paid to details throughout the book, both in terms of how many are included and how carefully they are presented. The level of detail in the captions and the vignettes (which give helpful context to what is going on at a specific point of time or in an era more broadly) accompanying the maps matches that of the maps themselves; even there, outside of the primary essays that ostensibly constitute the main text of the book, all sorts of information is incidentally introduced, such as references to the renaming of streets, conventions of the map-making and map-selling trades, and little morsels such as the path along with map plates passed between publishers. The commitment to detail extends to additional material provided in the form of a timeline of Boston land-making, a chronology of Boston history relevant to its geography (including annexation of towns, construction of notable buildings, population growth, demographic changes, and historical milestones), and a very helpful and thorough glossary.
The authors are completists in crediting, and providing biographical details about, map-makers in the broadest sense, not only the cartographers, strictly speaking, but the editors, engravers, printers, compilers, and publishers. And rightly so, since, for all that information is provided in depth and abundance—and in an abundance of forms—in this wonderfully packaged volume, the gorgeous maps themselves are unquestionably the stars and provide the primary joy in the experience of reading Mapping Boston. I took such a simple pleasure in following along as the information portrayed becomes better and more specific, and at noticing names and conventions and styles going in and out of common usage (even a 1948 map, despite the disappointment of an increasingly utilitarian approach to mapmaking, still retains some stark beauty in its simplicity and its characteristic midcentury modern typeface). In their most ornate forms, the maps have a beauty and craft that extends beyond their primary portrayals to the cartouches or engravings (such as of significant buildings) around the edge that embellish them; flair is brought even to such details as the marking of a distance to define a map's scale, which in one case is positioned between the tips of a depiction of calipers. Many of the maps are neat examples of physical artifacts as well, such as maps designed to be overlays showing various stages of battles and maps appended with literal attachments to create a literal version of an inset by way of two distinct pieces of paper in combination. Pleasingly, Boston's proximity to water allowed for numerous examples of what were my favorite inclusions, hydrographic charts with all sorts of details—shoreline profiles, shoals, banks, channels, mudflats, currents, sailing directions, and a virtual web of minuscule depth soundings (a sort of counterpart to the nearly-as-pleasing reticulated extensions of compass roses that I always liked to see featured).
July 28, 2016
A city has to be loved deeply to be able to inspire a book like this. I loved seeing the changes over the 4 centuries of Boston. The most dramatic changes are seeing the land mass spreading / "wharfing out." It's truly rewarding for this book to show not just the changes but explain what was happening and why. I know a lot about Boston but this book added lots of unknowns for me.
November 1, 2017
Mapping Boston is a compilation of chapters by a variety of authors, each one exploring different aspects of the Shawmut Peninsula and how it has changed over time. It's a coffee table size book, but one meant for lovers of maps and their history. It's also a great display book for any Boston resident to keep on their coffee table, great for browsing while sipping hot cocoa.
March 24, 2013
The gorgeous maps on their own make this publication worthy of a place on one's book shelf.
May 18, 2008
A beautiful book and fun to review
October 22, 2009
A very interesting look of how Boston has changed physically, through historical and present day maps.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews