Mental Mapping

This article from the Architectural League on avoidance mapping is interesting in itself – it has a lot to say about what different people feel is important in their local environment – but it’s also interesting in what it has to say accidentally about how people see those environments.

Some of the people interviewed have training in some form of visual communication, and their maps look like incomplete street maps or architectural drawings. They understand the spatial relationships between the various streets or rooms that they pass through and are capable of drawing those relationships in a recognizable manner. This ability is often referred to as having a sense of direction, because if you understand spatial relationships well enough to draw them, you can easily navigate them.

Some of the people interviewed do not have this skill and their diagrams are as a result very different. Instead of looking like street maps they have a dreamlike quality, with labels telling us what we’re seeing it is laid out in a non-representative drawing. These maps are just as real to the people involved but represent a different way of seeing an environment, more symbolic than literal.

Engineers and architects, by the nature of our work, are trained to make literal representations when we sketch. We’re so good at it that we can make literal representations of realities that don’t yet exist. There’s a question as to whether it’s all training or people who see the world this way self-select for our professions but the result is the same either way.

The map above is the town of Flushing in 1859. I grew up there a little over 100 years later; starting some 65 years after the town was absorbed into New York. Most of the streets have been renamed, some with the Queens number grid, some with other names. Broadway and Bridge Street are now Northern Boulevard, Jamaica Avenue is now Kissena Boulevard, and Jaggar Avenue became an extension of Main Street, for example. There’s at least one mistake: “Brone Avenue” should be Bowne Avenue (or maybe Bowne Street, as it is today). This mistake is particularly surprising since they have the Bowne name spelled correctly at the Bowne House. Amity Street, which was apparently only one block long at that time with an eastward extension planned, was the nucleus of Roosevelt Avenue, where the 7 train subway station is; the Flushing Railroad had not yet been absorbed into the Long Island Railroad empire and extended east to Port Washington.

I bring up this map because I haven’t seriously looked at a current-day street map of Flushing in decades. Growing up there engraved on me those streets; so that I can pick up the differences between this map and the current pattern without having to actually look. Even if some of my personal landmarks have disappeared – Giunta Pizzeria is long gone from Main Street – I can draw those streets or walk them without needing references or signs. I wonder if this feeling of the past being always present is common among people in the preservation field.