Manhattan will become taller, bulkier and 30 percent wider, to better display its spaghetti of subway lines. Staten Island, meanwhile, will shrink by half.

I guess that is what happens when the city is forced to prioritize. Since the beginning of time Staten always had to take a back seat to our favorite urban island as well as Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and even New Jersey.

Beginning this June, the MTA will be distributing the new and improved version of their transit bible (aka “The Map) to assist tourists, natives, and bridge-tunnel crowd city people with expanded cartographies of Manhattan that is less clutter and more “user-friendly.”

While it isn’t the most dramatic change, the new map will be the first re-design of the complex underground caverns of the city since 1979, when topographical features such as ferries, parks, neighborhood names, and major streets were first introduced on the map. It has been re-drawn in response to demands for more clarity, thus making sacrifices (like Staten Island) in the name of the greater good.

Since the abstract underground map was introduced for the London Underground designed by Harry Beck in 1931, transit maps have redefined how people envision and move through space in cities throughout the world, making maps and cities more “open and accessible.”

Here is the current NYC transit map (without transit info bubbles):

Other versions of the city have been more abstract like Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 map:

Other designers in the iPhone-App-age have attempted to ameliorate usability and accuracy with the “Kick Map” of NYC transit that is a hybrid of diagrammatic and topographic mapping. This concept enables a simultaneously understand of what is going on below the ground in relation to what is happening above–a concept that map designers believe will enable riders to better orient themselves inside and outside of the subways:

Better communicating the “wiggles” of the subway system is just one of many goals that map designers attempt to cope with. All these maps address the psychological difficulties riders have navigating the expansive 305 square miles of bagels, immigrants, and Yankee fans.

Let’s hope this new map won’t let us down.

3 map comparison:

I promised to spend my snow day in bed, reading with Holden Caufield and drinking Peppermint tea, but after 30 minutes, I’m restless, anxious. I find my gloves.

I like the way the snow covers up mistakes. Bundles up insecurities. The snow blankets the sidewalk and fills in the cracks. Everything is made equal. The city the virgin. In her pristine presence, everyone covers themselves to the point of suffocation. Children sweating and overheating like small vocal radiatiors. Begging their mothers to let them take of their hoods, their scarves, their sweaters. Mothers pull strings tighter, tuck corners deeper. It’s too warm for this weather. The rain and the snow fall together like cousins. Dancing some incestuous dance, they slop on my cheeks, her hands, his hat. There are men pushing the slush around, away from their doorsteps, with red shovels and plastic bags tied over their knotted hands.

I’m feeling mighty and defiant. I could fill my emptiness with soggy wanderlust, fill in my vacanices with snowy vagaries. My boots are the champions of the day, staunch and brown and determined. Let us march they say. Let us.

Block after block, the scenery stays the same. Fifth Avenue is as ugly as the rest in this sort of storm. Some of the people are outside, but nobody is rushing. All of us are taking advantage of the opportunity to be late, and wet, and sour. To blame it on the weather. Communal worship. We don’t even make eye contact. Such modesty.

It’s treacherous, this holy wonderland. There are vast oceanic puddles the slate gray of the concrete, disguising themselves to the weary traveler. Under the newest down there is old black ice that’s been around for hours and learned the tricks of the trade. City streets are not for dancing. After hours of trudging, my face stings like fire and my hands stiffen like ice. My boots are darker, wetter, stronger. A certain gust of wind blows me into a blue and white cafe, where I immediately pull off my hat and gloves, and take a seat, wondering if I might pull off my boots in public. I am approached by a waitress who looks warm and pale and lovely. I ask for coffee and an egg. She brings me both, and a bagel, and some fried potates. “House Special” she says, and I wonder how I so often elicit others pity, even my own. Here I am again, feeling sorry for myself. I deserve to be out in the rain with such soggy setimentality still filling my thoughts.

If it has stopped snowing, I can’t tell for the wind. It’s too hard to open my eyes, and through my squinting I can see the street lamps have come on to illuminate the shapeless, shifting gray. There is a woman in a puddle outside the Louis Vuitton glass front. Just laying there, eyes wide open in a goddamn puddle like a frozen duck. She has a dark gray blanket and no hat. I notice she has no hat because someone else noticed it first, and he was busy pulling his own hat off his head and jamming it down over the ears of this sad lonely duck in the pond.

Someone sometime on the radio had said if you call 311 in New York city, they’ll come pick up people with nowhere else to be. I couldn’t help but think about the ducks, and the fish, frozen there, protected by “God” till spring. All the while, I’m just standing and she’s just looking. The man I love decides to call me just then, just for that moment, and any sort of self-pitying I may or may not have been engaged in seemed foreign and unnatural. I can’t even tell him about it, and he’s the one I tell. I call the number, and after 30 minutes of robotic redirection and tacky hold music, there is a bright, kind voice on the other end. Says they’ll be right there, they have a lot of beds in the womens shelter. Never thought maybe I was jumping to conclusions, until I hung up the phone. Maybe she didn’t want to be picked up? But she was just lying there. Other people were starting to get the same idea, stopping to ask her if she needed a ride. I got to thinking she was awfully brave, making all these uncomfortable people so uncomfortable.

The whole time she never takes her eyes off me. I don’t know what to say to her, I couldn’t think of anything at all. It all sounded stupid in my head, so I just try to smile some gray, winter smile, and then I walk off. I think she may have smiled too, or maybe her teeth were chattering. I’m no hero. I don’t know.

I was gonna go home, but I was all soggy in the brain, so I went down into a subway station to finish the book. Not even a train passed by. “I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful.”

It looks like fortune might be leading me towards the City of Brotherly Love. Apparently, Fallopia’s destiny has turned to the eastern shore, but I am still trying to get my bearings. Leaving the West Coast is not an easy thing to do. I am a westerner by birth, tuned to the open skies and wide open highways. Nonetheless, I’ve been recently accepted to a graduate program in downtown Philadelphia- an area I’m told is dubbed “City Center”.

I have been to most of the major eastern shore metropoleis, but Philadelphia is…inland. Here is my first complaint about a city I know nothing about. How does a city become the 4th largest metropolis in the nation while being so far from the ocean? Absolutely afraid of being landlocked, I look for a river and find that there is one, named after the sound you make when choking on a piece of hair.

Okay. A river might suffice, but I am still wrestling with the question of where to live.
We all know that the space we call home has a social and emotional impact on us. That is why humans are nesters by nature. We surround ourselves with walls and hang scraps of fabric in our favorite colors. But what about the space outside your space? What is the importance of a street, and a block, and a neighborhood when you are looking for a place to be?

I’ll confess right now, the first thing I did was research the racial demographics of the city. It’s not 1962, but Philadelphia is still a very segregated city and I don’t want to be be the only brown girl on the block. I know this from a lifetime of experience being just that. This desire helped me eliminate the majority of the Northern block, leaving about 1/2 of the city to sort through.

Here is my personal add. YBF* seeks COB** with artists and trees. N/W*** is a must. Local book store a plus.

*Young black female
**Charactered older block
*** Near Water

I’m looking for suggestions, really. If any of you have ever been to Philadelphia, or have knowledge about any of the dozen or so wards that piece together the city, let’s talk.

One of the primary ways we understand new places and experiences is through our past. What we know serves as an interface to what we have yet to know.

Walking through the narrow streets of The Ironbound I’m overwhelmed by the associations I make to places I’ve known before. The flow of Spanish coming from the fast mouths of pedestrians is the rhythm of central and eastern Los Angeles. The cactus pieces at the supermarket are the same as those from Union and 6th.

On the street, people are strewn about their stoops; waiting, it seems, for day to melt into night. Unmoved and relaxed upon the concrete steps, they enjoy the luxury of summer while it’s still here. I’ve seen them before on Kimball in Logan Square. There is the little boy on his new silver bike.

It is unfair to allow memories to color our new experiences. Every city is not the same. Each life is outstanding and unique. Is there a point, one I have not reached yet, where the memories do fade into the background, and the places that were new emerge as separate entities radiating a life of their own? Or are we always seeing the same places over and over again, just telling it with different words? Every place mallieable, and always coming into being?

Calvino explores it better than I do in Invisible Cities:

(Marco Polo begins)

“Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.”

Marco Polo bowed his head.

“Venice,” the Khan said.

Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”

The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”

And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

“When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice, when I ask you about Venice.”

“To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.”

“You should then begin each tale of your travels from the departure, describing Venice as it is, all of it, not omitting anything you remember of it.”

…

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

Installed by former President Bush’s administration in 2006, the crimson addition to the diplomatic post was billed as a way to circumvent censorship and “offer hope and freedom to Cubans oppressed by a brutal regime”. Five-foot-high red letters that ran across 25 windows on the outside of the fifth floor streamed news, political statements and messages blaming Cuba’s problems on the country’s communist system and socialist economy.

After the United States launched the ticker, Cuba erected obstructions so it could not be seen, inciting increasingly negative “dueling billboards”.

Fidel Castro accused the U.S. mission of becoming “headquarters of the counterrevolution,” which he said violated diplomatic protocol. He led a million Cubans to protest in front of the mission in 2006, and erected 138 black flags (later traded for Cuban flags) to block the view of the ticker from those passing.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly told reporters in Washington that the news ticker was turned off in June.

The Obama administration believes the ticker was “really not effective as a means of delivering information to the Cuban people”, and was “not serving the interests of promoting a more productive relationship.”

Pause.

Really?

I need a moment here to pause and be grateful. I live a wonderful life, and these are the things I am thankful for today:

1. Oatmeal cookies when I come from work.
2. Air in my bicycle tires.
3. A President that doesn’t humiliate me, or make me sulk in American despair.

Whether or not you’ve ever been a fan of President Obama or his politics, maybe some can agree on this point. Let’s not broadcast hate speech on our diplomatic posts.
Let’s not.

Spokesman Kelly noted that the Cubans had dismantled “a few very negative billboards and graffiti” around the facility and the United States viewed their removal as “a positive gesture.”

“Hot Ideas for a Cooler Planet”

Opinionated Globes

If you are in the LA area and haven’t already checked it out you should take a walk through the rose gardens of Exposition Park and check out the exhibit Cool Globes. It is a collection of giant globes made and painted by various groups from all over the country. Each globe has its own particular environmental focus, such as sustainable agriculture or clean energy, presented in uniquely artistic ways. The collection is meant to inspire people to actively consider how they can act locally to make a positive global impact. Environmental groups, public schools, and artists from all over the country contributed to the collection which includes over 50 different globes.

It is a traveling exhibition and will only be in LA for a few more weeks. It is completely FREE and worth your time. It’s a perfect place for an early evening stroll as the sun sets over South Los Angeles. Be sure to check the other museums in Exposition Park while you’re there.

Where Old Cell Phones Go

The result of over a decade-long field study, Righteous Dopefiend follows the lives of several heroin addicts living under Edgewater Boulevard, a freeway overpass in the picturesque city by the bay. The authors’ approach to the project is one that self-consciously “suspends moral judgment.” The challenge to both the writers and the audience is to set aside opinions on urban vice associated with homelessness and addiction, enabling the narrative to emerge from the people who live these lives.

The self-conscious decision to make a critical yet sensitive study is conveyed through the distinct style of the book. The risk of confirming negative stereotypes through “jarring photography” is of the upmost concern to the authors. Bourgois and Schonberg thus create a dialogue between rich black-and-white photographs, vivid excerpts from their field notes, and critical social theory. Excerpts from the fieldnotes give context for images which the audience may not readily comprehend.

By accompanying the photographs with fieldnotes and scholarly analysis, the impression of addiction becomes multi-faceted, ensuring that the addict experience is not pigeonholed. They remark, “as anthropologists studying people who live under conditions of extreme duress and distress, we feel it is imperative to link theory to practice. Otherwise, we would be merely intellectual voyeurs.” Bourgois and Schonberg’s balance between image, word, and theory reflects their research methods, inviting the audience to witness and experience, rather than analyze , this community.

The community created through drug use is the centerpiece of their study. The authors depict aspects of street life through the voices and meditations of various people living under Edgewater Boulevard. The personal relationships between addicts create a distinct community with its own particular moral and ethical rules. Dopesickness, for example, an ailment encompassing the severe physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal, is an experience that fuels the “moral economy of sharing.” Being sick elicits empathy among members who are both friends and enemies. “It is considered unethical,” the authors observe, “to leave a person stranded when he or she is dopesick unless one is openly feuding with that person.”

Assuaging dopesickness is one of the few instances where ethnic and racial boundaries may be crossed. Although the power of addiction may appear to overwhelm racism, division along racial and ethnic lines is part of everyday life on Edgewater Boulevard. When Bourgois asks Hank, one of the white dopefiends, why the scene is predominately white, Hank replies, “You’ll see very few black people homeless…because they’re knocking out kids on welfare.” Several members harbor mistrust and stereotypes of dopefiends from differing ethnic backgrounds despite being intertwined in a network of dealing and dependency.

Besides delving into the shadows of street life, the authors also explore the evolution of love between residents of the camp. One couple, Tina and Carter, develop a surprisingly domestic and committed relationship despite personal histories of abuse, homelessness, and addiction. Bourgois and Schonberg also follow Hank and Petey, best friends and lovers who struggle to live in a homophobic, yet fraternal, environment. Their turbulent relationship is tempered by the impediments that surround them: possible eviction, pan-handling, hospitalization, methadone treatment, and death.

Bourgois and Schonberg preserve the dopefiends’ humanity while simultaneously excavating the grittiest aspects of life on the street, managing to keep their commitment to put aside moral judgment. Reminiscent of an evocative documentary film, their book is beautifully shot, intelligent, and engaging.

Photography by Jeff Schonberg