Allan Appel photo
1928 pictorial map by one of the few women cartographers, Carina Eaglesfield Mortimer.
If these days you sometimes feel a little lost, you might get a clearer sense of where you are in the Elm City by dropping by the New Haven Museum’s Whitney Library map collection.
There on Saturday afternoon in the latest edition of librarian Emma Norden’s “What’s in the Whitney Library” program, Norden had out on display some two dozen cartographic delights, including a city-commissioned 1879 map with a kind of bird’s eye aerial view of our then mightily industrializing burg.
Among the 50 people who visited “Map Madness” — the most recent of Norden’s regular once-a-month Saturdays in which she shows off the Whitney Library’s un-appreciated treasures — was Anderson Street resident Ginger Nash.
Nash said she not only appreciated the visual whoosh and style of the 1879 map, how the growing city seemed to be tucking itself neatly between our two rocks, but she was also able to accurately locate her own house on Anderson Street, which then had at least two more blocks than exist today.
Brendan Murphy and Ginger Nash study the 1879 city map.
Her visit also resolved a contradiction between two of her property documents, she reported, one saying the house was built in 1870, the other in 1898.
The cartographic evidence of the earlier date was before her at the Whitney Library.
“So cool,” she said.
Nearby, long-time landscape architect Channing Harris was poring over Amos Doolittle’s 1824 map with an eye on the Grove Street Cemetery “to see how the shape of the cemetery expanded in stages.”
A board member of the Friends of Grove Street Cemetery and the New Haven Preservation Trust, Harris is leading a tour of the cemetery on May 10 to mark the club’s centennial, and the Doolittle map, he said, gave him a snapshot of the cemetery “when it was 30 years old and not fully developed.”
As other visitors gathered around him, Harris’s finger hovered over a dark squiggle to the north and west of the cemetery block.
“This shows a stream, where the Farmington Canal would be under excavation just a few years after the map [was published] and the canal would define the northern part of the cemetery.”
This of course gives us today’s names, Canal and Lock streets, but the map says there was also a Plainville Road, which no longer exists as the cemetery ate it up in an expansion to the north and the west, Harris said, and Ashmun Street was later added.
He noted, and would likely pass on to his interlocutors on May 10, that the little marks around the perimeter of the cemetery block are documentary evidence that trees had already been planted and were growing in 1824.
Amos Doolittle map detail showing Grove Street Cemetery area.
Norden said she takes particular delight in the accuracy of the Doolittle map, which shows not only the houses, but their doors and windows as well.
Opposite the Doolittle was also, in his own now faint hand, Yale President Ezra Stiles’s 1775 “Plan of New Haven and Harbor,” the oldest and rarest map on display, with the colonial Nine Squares around which development takes place, but always, also, in relation to the water.
Originally named streets like Leather Lane, Brick Street, and Market Street, on this map, gave way to the street names we largely have today when the decision was made ”in 1784, in which year the division of the Nine Squares by intersecting streets was agreed upon,” according to the accompanying explanatory text about the map.
Arrayed around these major all-city maps Norden had also displayed a wonderful little collection of neighborhood maps created by local civic groups, in, for example, Wooster Square.
And then the other theme were maps that showed the development over time of the city’s park system — East Shore and Edgewood Park, for example, were clearly laid out on a 1924 map, but not on the sister 1915 version that lay nearby.
As visitors moved from station to station around the sunny rectangular main library room, you got the sense that map talk often leads to related historical and other cultural talk as well.
For example, why, someone asked, was there a kind of explosion of map making post-1867?
Harris had an answer for that one: “Lots of men had learned surveying in the Civil War, and other skills surrounding map making.”
And there was a need to employ them, he added.
Come 1876, the centennial of the country, and there’s suddenly a publishing explosion of atlases and gazetteers and a kind of national passion to demarcate, on maps both local and national, just who we are by measure of streets, roads, schools, parks, and what has been built.
“The goal is to set out on display what we have and bring in,” said Norden, “the items to be appreciated and be utilized.”
And that very much had been happening this day. Each Saturday session runs from about noon to 4:00 p.m., and earlier in the day Norden said she’d had a conversation with a West Haven teacher who had dropped by looking for certain specific maps for a history class she was teaching.
“We made an appointment and she’ll be coming back later,” Norden said.
Librarian Emma Norden with map researcher Cole Peterson.
The library has about 250 maps and most are of course not on view. That’s why, in part, Norden reprised a map theme this season, the second year in which she has been conducting her special “What’s in the Whitney Library” Saturdays.
Other themes this year showcased the library’s holdings about the local Black Panthers and May Day 1970, which attracted a large crowd, and there was a Saturday session on broadsides, posters, and proclamations; one on “Women of the Whitney;” and one on the holdings pertaining to the development of the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, one of the oldest in the country, and a violinist played nearby for that one.
Other strong collections are genealogy and architectural drawings, and the latter will be the focus of the final Saturday of the season — a May 17 session called “Orr-chitecture,” centered on the work of Douglas Orr, who designed the New Haven Lawn Club and other important 20th century buildings in New Haven.