Cartographies of Time: A Visual History of the Timeline

A chronology of one of our most inescapable metaphors, or what Macbeth has to do with Galileo.

I was recently asked to select my all-time favorite books for the lovely Ideal Bookshelf project by The Paris Review’s Thessaly la Force. Despite the near-impossible task of shrinking my boundless bibliophilia to a modest list of dozen or so titles, I was eventually able to do it, and the selection included Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton — among both my 7 favorite books on maps and my 7 favorite books on time, this lavish collection of illustrated timelines traces the history of graphic representations of time in Europe and the United States from 1450 to the present, featuring everything from medieval manuscripts to websites to a chronological board game developed by Mark Twain.

The first chapter, Time in Print, begins with a context for these images:

While historical texts have long been subject to critical analysis, the formal and historical problems posed by graphic representations of time have largely been ignored. This is no small matter: graphic representation is among our most important tools for organizing information.* Yet, little has been written about historical charts and diagrams. And, for all of the excellent work that has been recently published on the history and theory of cartography, we have few examples of work in the area Eviatar Zerubavel has called time maps. This book is an attempt to address that gap.”

* Cue in Visual Storytelling and graphic designer Francesco Franchi on representation vs. interpretation.

The Morning News has a wonderful slideshow of images from the book this week. A few favorites:

The Histomap by John Sparks,1931.

In this universal history Johannes Buno, 1672, each millennium before the birth of Christ is depicted by an image of a large allegorical being. This dragon represents the fourth millennium B.C.

In the 1860s, French engineer Charles Joseph Minard pioneered several new infographic techniques. Published in 1869, this endures as his most famous graphic, featuring two diagrams that depict the size and attrition of the armies of Hannibal in his expedition across the Alps during the Punic wars and of Napoleon during his assault on Russia. The faded-red color band indicates the army’s strength of numbers, with one millimeter in thickness representing ten thousand men. The chart of Napoleon's march also includes a measure of temperature.

While mapping the body, the mind, and the heavens might be traced back to antiquity, mapping time, Rosenberg and Grafton remind us, is a fairly nascent enterprise:

The timeline seems among the most inescapable metaphors we have. And yet, in its modern form, with a single axis and a regular, measured distribution of dates, it is a relatively recent invention. Understood in this strict sense, the timeline is not even 250 years old. How this could be possible, what alternatives existed before, and what competing possibilities for representing historical chronology are still with us, is the subject of this book.”

A 'synchronous chart' from Meteorographica (1863) by Francis Galton, pioneer of the study and mapping of weather. The chart represents weather conditions, barometric pressure, and wind direction at a single moment in time across the geographic space of Europe.

Discus chronologicus by German engraver Christoph Weigel, published in the early 1720s, is a paper chart with a pivoting central arm. Rings represent kingdoms, radial wedges represent centuries, and the names of kingdoms are printed on the moveable arm.

From literature to art history to technology, Cartographies of Time offers a fascinating and dimensional lens on what it means to peer from a single moment of time outward into all other moments that came before and will come after, and inward into our own palpable yet subjective perception of permanence and its opposite.

Images courtesy of Princeton Architectural Press / The Morning News

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The Greatest Grid: How Manhattan’s Famous Street Map Came to Be

What Edgar Allan Poe, the Dead Rabbits, and Charles Dickens have to do with New York’s defining feature.

For the first two hundred years of Manhattan history, the Collect Pond, a lovely, spring-fed reservoir that bubbled up on the border of what is now Chinatown and the Financial District, was the main water source for most city dwellers. The streets grew up organically around it, private roads bounded by a vacant, rocky, wasteland to the north, from what is now 23rd to 90th streets. These were the city-owned Common Lands, and after the revolution they were something the debt-ridden city needed to parcel out and sell fast.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the Collect Pond had turned into a quite literal cesspool, and the the city paved it over to accommodate a booming population. Five streets came together over the newly-filled pond, which still seeped though the cobblestones, and at the heart of this intersection grew a infamous slum, ruled by gangs like the Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys. When Charles Dickens visited in 1842, the scene shocked him:

Poverty, wretchedness, and vice….all that is loathsome…narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking every where with dirt and filth.”

(That same year, he rather excitedly wrote of returning to Broadway in his diary, noting in a matter-of-factly manner the curbside intermingling of pigs, hogs, and well-dressed ladies.)

Where streets converged, so did humanity, proof positive that right angles could mean the difference between utopia and bedlam.

A 'South East View of the City of New York in North America,' ca. 1763, by Thomas Howdell. The tallest spire is Trinity Church. (Museum of the City of New York)

The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan 1811-2011, based on the current exhibition of the same name at the Museum of the City of New York, tells the story of the city’s right angles. The Commissioner’s Plan of 1811, the map and surveying scheme that set the blocks at 200 by 800 feet all the way up the length of the island, was an audacious gamble on growth. From 1790 to 1810, the population of New York had tripled, and the commissioners predicted that by 1860, New York would have almost the same population as Paris, then home to half a million people. (They were wrong, of course — New York would top nearly 800,000 by then.)

The Commissioner's Plan of 1811, by John Randel, Jr. (Courtesy of the New York City Municipal Archives)

The grid was far from simple to achieve. “Mannahatta” translates to “island of hills,” and the rocky wasteland to the north had to be surveyed to perfection, and private roads, farms, and pastures wrestled into order by a ruthless eminent domain. This meant plenty of opportunity for graft, personified by William “Boss” Tweed, who would pocket city officials and buy up lots just as they opened city streets.

A map from 1835 of property belonging to Clement Clarke Moore in Chelsea. These newly subdivided lots eventually came to be worth fortunes. (Museum of the City of New York)

View of Second Avenue looking up from 42nd Street, 1861, by Egbert L. Viele.

There were problems with the plan: a lack of public parks and open space, constant congestion, overbuilt lots, no vistas or urban openings for important civic buildings. The only open space the Commissioners allowed was a parade ground in the vicinity of present-day Madison Square. But the grid system allowed for these cut-throughs to happen later, in the form of Broadway, Central Park, Rockefeller Center, Columbia University, and the thousand smaller parks and plazas easily carved out of the 1811 plan.

Aerial View of Madison Square, 1894, by J.S. Johnston. (Museum of the City of New York)

The grid was easier to implement on the flat East side than on the hilly West. By 1860, streetcars could only travel up 8th avenue to 84th street before the terrain became impassable. Huge outcroppings of rocks, the kind that are found in the Ramble in Central Park, blocked the way for most development. Small mountains had to be blasted apart or cut through, and the hundred foot changes in elevation around Morningside Heights and Inwood has created a strange and magical neighborhood of apartments perched on peaks and valleys, still for the most part obeying the grid.

Rocks at 81st Street and 9th Avenue, December 1886, by Robert L. Bracklow, (Museum of the City of New York)

In the 1840s, at the still rural intersection of 84th and Broadway, Edgar Allan Poe rented a room at the Brennan Farm House, the likely location where he wrote “The Raven.” The farm was on a rise from the dirt Broadway road, and from his window Poe could witness nature give way to the city:

These magnificent placers are doomed. The spirit of Improvement has withered them with its acrid breath. Streets are already ‘mapped’ through them, and they are no longer suburban residences, but ‘town-lots.’”

The Greatest Grid, a fine addition to our favorite books about maps, is a catalog of development and destruction, the end of nature and the beginning of urban living. When the grid eventually overtook the Brennan farmhouse, it too was destroyed. All was not lost for Poe, however. In the 1980s, the city council wanted to mark the writing place of the now famous author—they named the street after him.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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Matthew Picton’s Map Sculptures of Cities Made of Books about the City

From Hunter S. Thompson to Wagner, or what Ulysses has to do with news headlines from 9/11.

As a hopeless lover of maps and cities, and even more so of books about maps and books about cities, I was instantly enthralled by the work of Oregon-based British artist Matthew Picton, whose stunning paper sculptures of cities are made of books and other textual materials related to the respective city, taking the art of book sculpture to whole new level of meta with subtle, thoughtful commentary through the selection of the specific texts.

Jerusalem created from The New Testament, The Torah, The Armenian Bible and The Koran

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Dresden in 1945, made of Wagner's score for The Ring, 2010

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Portland created from the covers and text of the novel The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LaGuin and the DVD covers of the films Dante's Peak and Volcano; the work has been smoked

Photo by Ron Jaffe

London in 1666, created from the book covers of The Plague Years by Daniel Defoe

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Dublin on June 16, 1904, created from text from James Joyce's Ulysses

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Lower Manhattan created from headlines that accompanied the 2001 World Trade Center attacks and DVD covers of the film Towering Inferno and book covers of the novel The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

Photo by Ron Jaffe

Las Vegas in 1972, created from texts from Hunter S. Thompson’s 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'

Photo by Ron Jaffe

If’re a fellow bibliophile with a soft spot for the intersection of cities and cartography, don’t forget these 5 essential books on maps and 7 essential books on cities.

via roomthily

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