Unbuilt Robert Moses Highway Maps

Not only does this post include two great (and chilling) maps of how Robert Moses’ New York City might have looked, but it warns us against our impulse to accept online base maps as apolitical representations.

I present my Google Maps version of the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway and Mid Manhattan Expressways … Now there have been maps showing these proposed highways before … but the point of doing it up to look like a Google Map was to put these highways in a modern context … 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.

I’m reminded of the introduction to Denis Wood’s The Power of Maps, in which he says maps “enable the past to become part of our living . . . now . . . here.”