Mind map of New York, Spring 2005, by Joseph Wilson

From MemoryArchive

In 1976 Saul Steinberg drew a cover for the New Yorker that was basically a map of the city from memory, drawn with respect to his office on 9th Avenue. He wasn’t trying to make it to scale, or make it realistic, and you can see a blob in the background labelled “Asia”, because his idea of the city of New York had these big bulges in it when he pictured the city near where he lived because that’s what he knew most intimately.

Maps are strange things, and it must have been quite a revolution to have a schematic drawn in scale on a piece of paper that anyone, in theory, could follow. You hear stories of Southern Pacific islanders having their own versions of maps that, instead of relying on the 2D media of paper, are constructed around the perspective change of different islands as they appear to shift in a moving boat. Or the Inuit, having maps that are based on the direction of snow drift, or using snow-banks as markers for progress. The stars, too, were traditionally used as maps for direction, except we’ve largely lost this skill, which I think is a shame.

The best thing about exploring a new city is that moment when you see something you recognize. During separate day trips wandering neighbourhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan, isolated chunks of images and neighbourhoods started to float in my brain: one for the Lower east Side, one for Greenwich Village, one for DUMBO. The best part was when two of these isolated chunks bumped up against one another and formed a bridge with another chunk, like when my chunk for Nolita suddenly overlapped with my chunk of the Lower east side, they morphed into this larger chunk of map in my brain. I imagined I had just illuminating more of a map of Manhattan that was sitting on a table in the dark, like how regions of land get lit up when you walk through them in games like Civilization.

I remember this happening to me in Toronto many times during my first year at University. Chunks of Queen Street would start sticking together like a jig-saw puzzle, but more fluid, almost like the bits of mercury that glob together to make the bad guy in Terminator 2. I used to think that the McDonalds on Bloor Street by the ROM was South East of the ROM and that Bloor Street ran parallel to Yonge.

The only way to do this really is by walking. You have the time to see the people around you, hear the timbre of their voices and smell the city as it changes. Sabrina and I walked all the way form the United Nations building (boring) down 42nd street past the Chrysler Building, Grand Central Station, the big humanities library, Bryant Park, Times Square until we ended up at the Hudson. It was weird how the city became deserted past Broadway and the walk back felt like we were in Etobicoke or something, except that the New Yorker building was in the background and there was a closed and eerily silent Copa Cabana nightclub bleaching in the sun.

I remember walking up to the same little park at 7th and Charles from two different directions on two different days and I remember having to pause and let my brain shift the two experiences next to one another in my head so I could merge their geographic relationship.

So what I want to know is this: do these little chunks that represent geographical neighbourhoods exist in separate spots in my brain? Are there different neurons for mapping different places, and do those neurons sift around when I make connections? How about now when I’m remembering the experience; have these geographical markers shifted into the long-term memory part of my brain? (Or, as Steven Katz used to say, the books have been returned to the stacks, and new books have been pulled out to be reshuffled on the table in front of me as short-term memory).