Casa Griffin is on high ground between two watersheds and the whole city would float away before we were troubled as long as we stayed home, which we tend to do, so whatever you've seen in the national news, you don't need to worry about us. A death toll of two is not very impressive in any case, but sweeping away a bus is. I've never seen a flood shut down bus service before.
Flooding is a recurrent factor here in San Antonio, with the city's fanciest districts located in the flood zones of waterways that are dry or insignificant-looking most of the time; but we're used to it. For the most part, we are good at floods, and getting better all the time. The locals who know better than to drive into running water (most of us) tend to be contemptuous at people who are so careless as to do so, and when the folks who live in those flood zones get notice to evacuate, they don't go back for the family silver, they evacuate. I don't remember the last time a vote to fund flood engineering failed around here. It sounds callous to say so, but for the most part people who need rescuing or die in flooding do so as a result of their own bad judgement, which is hardly a consolation to their relatives. Floods aren't like tornadoes, after all. You can make a reasonable guess at how flood water will behave, based both on experience and the known qualities of water. All the sensible decision-making in the world won't help you predict the movements and behavior of a tornado.
My calmness in the face of flooding has, of course, been paid for by preceding generations. Plenty of people have died in San Antonio in floods over the years; downtown was nearly washed away in 1865 and in 1921. I wish the local polities and citizens would react to drought the way we do to flooding, in fact. We learned from events of those years, spent the money to prepare ourselves for future similar events, developed a culture in which good flood management and sensible behavior during flood warnings can flourish. We're still monumentally stupid on the subject of droughts, which are far more common.
So what would it take, I wonder, to make a true flood disaster in San Antonio?
Alternatively, what kind of drought event would be sufficient to finally prod us into treating droughts with the same level of preparation and common sense that we apply to flooding?
It's not a story till it has characters; but the advantage of playing "what if?" with your hometown is, that you can stick yourself and your own family in as placeholders while you're developing the concept.
Showing posts with label San Antonio. Show all posts
Showing posts with label San Antonio. Show all posts
Sunday, May 26, 2013
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Research Walk
Yesterday, I got together my maps, my notebook, some fruit in an insulated bag, and a bottle of water, and I took the bus downtown to figure out where Di was living when Len came to town.
See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.
Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as
As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.
Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.
So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!
I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.
I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.
And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.
I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.
But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.
And again.
And again.
See, I had picked Yturri Street because of its proximity to the cotton yards; but I realized that Yturri (a short street in the middle of the bend in the river, comprising an area analogous to St. Mary's Street between Commerce and the old library) would have been part of the area devastated by the flood of March 26, 1865. According to the two and a half columns of coverage in the April 7 Semi-Weekly News, the "freshets of March 26" were a disaster - families homeless, merchandise destroyed, property lost or injured in areas never flooded before, and loss of life.
Mind you, it's difficult for a modern researcher to be sure where this devastation lay. The report printed in the Semi-Weekly News describes the hardest-hit areas as
running across the bend of the river, one from above Mr. Simpson's house to the rear of Dr. Herff's house, which proved so destructive, and the other from about Mr. Gidding's house to Nat Lewis's mill, across Main Street.
As it happens, I know where Nat Lewis's mill was. Not only is it commemorated by one of the Riverwalk's tile historical markers and noted on one of my maps, but I used to work for the local utility company, constructed on what was once known as Bowen's Island near the ford where the mill was located. I remember when Betty Farlow put together a display about the history of the site for the company, back in the 80s. She could never interest the corporation in producing a proper historical booklet, but she did enough work to have written one and would pour her findings into my sympathetic and interested ear at lunch. So I know about the mill, the ford, the Turnverein, the nude bathing off the bridge - the works. But Giddings, Herff, and Simpson are, if not strangers to me (certainly not Giddings, operator of the Jackass Mail), not people I'm on visiting terms with.
Still, Bowen's Island is adjacent to Yturri Street and Main is a couple of blocks west of it, so I would either have to choose another street or enter the complication that when Len goes to the address she has for Di, in order to inform her of her father's death, neither Di nor her house will be there. I chose the complication because, face it, everybody gets lost their first time in San Antonio. I'm not sure how to make this into a way to advance the plot, but that's the sort of thing I can figure out as I go. First thing's first: find where Di and the Middletons moved to, and figure out how hard it will be to track them down.
So off I went, tramping through the streets, map in hand, constantly comparing it to the existing streets. In a couple of places I found helpful historical markers - at the German-English School and at the site of Guenther's Upper Mill - that made it easier to peel back the layers of time to the right year. At the Upper Mill, for example, I found that the mill wouldn't have been there - since Mauermann made his map in 1868, it shows features that wouldn't have existed three years earlier, and this is one of them. The mill was razed for river widening in 1924 - so this tells me not only that the map is "wrong" on this point, but that the river I see today is wider than the river Len will see if she has occasion to go that far south. But wait, there's more! Set into the ground a few yards from the mill marker are a couple of stones, marked "Stribling House 1859-1926;" and between them is a huge black walnut tree. So - no mill, but a substantial house with a stone foundation where the owner has planted a black walnut!
I am tolerably familiar with downtown San Antonio. I lived there, in a now-gone apartment across the street from the Southwest Craft Center and the former KMOL studios (now WOAI-TV) for the crucial years between dropping out of Trinity University and moving in with Damon. Most of the jobs I've had, temporary or permanent, were downtown. When a convention I'm interested in comes to town, like ALA, TLA, or IRA, it's in the convention center across from the German English school. And when visitors come to town, I'm their native guide. I've even done walking research there before, in order to see what Ada and Amber saw when they switched places across time in Switching Well. I can tell you ghost stories, history stories, movie stories, any kind of story you'd like about the heart of San Antonio - and still, the light bulbs kept coming on over my head as I realized - oh, that's what they did with that street; oh, this is where I am; oh, here's where that was.
I never realized before that the famous Market House, a honey of a building cooled by fountains and designed to look like a massive Greek temple, was built on the flood channel. It hadn't struck me that either the old cathedral had to be oriented differently from the new one, or that parishioners had to cross the Main Acequia to get in the front door. I hadn't noticed that Dolorosa Street, rather than turning into Market Street, becomes the sidewalk in front of the courthouse and continues as that little alley behind the old library.
And I finally realize just how wrongheaded it was to continue the line of Navarro Street as South St. Mary's; requiring, as it did, that St. Mary's Street be laid out to turn sharply eastward (about in line with the old bend in the river that delineated Bowen's Island) in order to join up with an existing street that continued the line of Navarro (only it wasn't Navarro at that point; it was Paso). For years I've been repeating the local story blaming St. Mary's Street's bewildering layout - running north, south, east, and west all in the course of a single mile - on the burro drivers who fell asleep on their way home and let the animals find their own way; but in this part of town, at least, blame must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the city engineers.
I'm not going to lay it all out for you in tedious detail. This is sort of place geekery should be done in person, and if you ever want a native guide to San Antonio, give me a call - we're in the book. It's enough to know that I understand the town I love better, and I found exactly the right neighborhood and type of house the Middletons and Di will relocate to, at exorbitant rent, after the flood. I also know exactly where the Plaza Hotel was, where the James Vance family lived (historical marker - corner of modern Nueva and S. Main, then Nueva and Acequia streets, only Acequia didn't run that far) and have a good sense of the cotton yards. I still need to locate some livery stables, an office for Julian Middleton, and no doubt other sites I don't know about yet.
But I know enough to get Len well and truly lost, and that'll do to go on with. It was an excellent morning's work (do not ever devote a summer afternoon to a research walk in San Antonio if you value your health!) and I wrote a fair amount today. I look forward to doing it again.
And again.
And again.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Reflections on the To-do List
Not blogging much this morning as I have too much to do; so much I drank caffeinated tea to help me along. (My husband refers to this as "taking speed.") Maritha Burmeister is having a signing of her first-ever book, The Twelve Dog Days of Christmas in New York, at the Twig between 5 and 7 this evening, so I'll have to leave off reading old newspapers at the library to take either the ten or the nine bus out there; then I can take the 20, transfer at Five Points, and get home later than I usually like to be out. I turn into a pumpkin by 10 PM and late suppers are a bad idea for me.
Okay, I don't have to do that. But, though Maritha and I are hardly best friends, and picture books aren't an area I was ever big on even when I was small, I like her, it's her first book which is a big deal, and the little girls for whom I've been buying picture books are going to outgrow them soon so I better do this while I can. Besides, I want to live in a world in which people go out of their way to go to book signings, and it's my responsibility to myself to do it as often as possible. To myself, and to Maritha, who has worked hard for this day. I actually hope I don't have much of a chance to speak to her, because the only signings at which the author has plenty of downtown for conversation are the ones with no lines, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody!
What Thai did to the glass of tea this morning has rendered cleaning the study more urgent. I totally don't want to do this. The study is the most complex room in the house, and you can't even dust without making decisions about pieces of paper that wouldn't be lying around if anybody knew what to do with them. I've mopped up the worst of it, but that's only the beginning and we all know it.
And dammit, I want to at least get the blouse I'm working on back to where I thought I had it at lunchtime yesterday. I can't get over how much sewing resembles writing. Everything takes longer than you think it will, sometimes when you think you're almost done you blink and recognize what you did wrong so you have to rip out seams, sometimes you rip out the wrong seam, the workspace is always a shambles when you're done no matter how organized and tidy you thought you were being, when you get on a roll you work at it longer than you should, and no matter how much you want to move on to the next, new project if you want to get anything done you really need to finish up the thing you're working on, even though you've gotten to the boring part. (The sleeveless version of this blouse looked so simple, it should have been the ideal place to fuss with the darts...)
And OMG it's how did it get to be 10 AM? It's impossible, I tell you! So off I go.
Okay, I don't have to do that. But, though Maritha and I are hardly best friends, and picture books aren't an area I was ever big on even when I was small, I like her, it's her first book which is a big deal, and the little girls for whom I've been buying picture books are going to outgrow them soon so I better do this while I can. Besides, I want to live in a world in which people go out of their way to go to book signings, and it's my responsibility to myself to do it as often as possible. To myself, and to Maritha, who has worked hard for this day. I actually hope I don't have much of a chance to speak to her, because the only signings at which the author has plenty of downtown for conversation are the ones with no lines, and I wouldn't wish that on anybody!
What Thai did to the glass of tea this morning has rendered cleaning the study more urgent. I totally don't want to do this. The study is the most complex room in the house, and you can't even dust without making decisions about pieces of paper that wouldn't be lying around if anybody knew what to do with them. I've mopped up the worst of it, but that's only the beginning and we all know it.
And dammit, I want to at least get the blouse I'm working on back to where I thought I had it at lunchtime yesterday. I can't get over how much sewing resembles writing. Everything takes longer than you think it will, sometimes when you think you're almost done you blink and recognize what you did wrong so you have to rip out seams, sometimes you rip out the wrong seam, the workspace is always a shambles when you're done no matter how organized and tidy you thought you were being, when you get on a roll you work at it longer than you should, and no matter how much you want to move on to the next, new project if you want to get anything done you really need to finish up the thing you're working on, even though you've gotten to the boring part. (The sleeveless version of this blouse looked so simple, it should have been the ideal place to fuss with the darts...)
And OMG it's how did it get to be 10 AM? It's impossible, I tell you! So off I go.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Miscellaneous News
The Clovis Comet theory has been disproved - no it hasn't - is reasonable - no it isn't - explains a lot - doesn't make any sense. There's only one thing to do with a theory like that: get more data in order to revise it some more! An astronomer suggests that, while a single cometary impact is unlikely, the one that broke up to create the Taurid system could have showered us with lots of little bits of comet, which answers some objections, but not others. Such is science.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Was a Giant Comet Responsible for for a North American Catastrophe in 11,000 BC?
If you've been reading the Idea Garage Sale at all, I trust you don't need my help to see the potential in this headline: Teen Agers in Iowa Find Body on Egg Hunt
Or this one: Mayor Sends in Troops after April UFO Panic
Or in the poltergeist in the tire depot who leaves pre-WWII pennies lying around.
Or Family discovers ancient chapel hidden under their house. Classic!
And you just can't beat a good hominid skeleton, even if they do keep calling them "missing links," which is a silly name: Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa
Meanwhile, back in the fall of 1863, the Semi-Weekly News has been forced by paper shortages to reduce it's print to about six-point and its circulation to once per week. Mr. Potchiusky (husband of the Mrs. Potschiusky who would sell the services of her large Singer if anyone had fabric?) is called a liar for what he said about Mr. Herman Hesse in a notice he put up on "all the corners of the town;" a 12-year-old boy left his home to hunt for cattle and a week later is still gone; the auction house of Florian and Jefferson is holding a "receiver's sale" of the effects of "enemy aliens;" and a mass meeting and barbeque at San Pedro Springs has passed a number of resolutions against those who depreciate currency and don't give their all for the war effort. Their names and addresses will be published in the paper until they shape up; anybody who won't shape up will be the subject of a general meeting to determine what action to take against them. A resolution previously made to punish depreciators of currencey "to the last extremity" is reaffirmed. But the big story is government cotton - the government's been buying it, and shipping it, and yet never seems to have any to put on the ships in Brownsville. It's very mysterious and though Major Hart the cotton agent (who called on the editor to clear up some points, he having his HQ here in San Antonio) says his books are open to inspection Gen. Magruder is calling for informants instead of for an audit. I feel like someone trying to keep up with a soap opera by watching it in random five-minute stints two or three times a week.
Reading Old Maps
The Texana room at the Enchilada, where I'm reading the Civil War Semi-Weekly News, is closed on Mondays, so instead I walked across downtown (on the Riverwalk; not a hardship) to the San Antonio Conservation Society to raid their library for maps. I wasn't very hopeful about this, as I remembered from researching Switching Well that the yearly updating of city maps is a new thing and that the best I'd probably be able to do was get maps that bracketed my time; but in fact their catalog yielded quite a few possibilities.
Maps, like other research materials, are created for purposes not necessarily related to those of the individual researcher. One map I looked at showed few to no geographical features, but consisted entirely of the puzzle pieces of survey plats. A godsend for certain kinds of research; useless to me. One, combining data from an 1868, an 1899, and a 1965 map, was primarily intended to show the locations of vanished businesses and landmarks, such as the Bat Cave (as we called the insecure jail/courthouse of most of the 19th century) and Wm. Gamble's bookstore, in relation to the 20th-century downtown. So it'll be excellent for my location scouting, in one respect; but misleading in another, as it shows modern streets - notably Houston - that didn't exist in my time period, and limited in another, as it doesn't even show all of downtown. The map that shows me the mid-nineteenth century districts or wards of the city doesn't show all the street names. And so on.
The great find of the day was a 1924 blueprint copy of "The City of San Antonio, made in 1868 and 1869 by stepping by A.J. Mauermann." It's confusing at first, because he put east at the top; but once you get oriented this is the bomb! In addition to labeling the river, streets, acequias, and plazas, he's drawn in all the buildings, with the most important ones (churches, schools, gas factory, ice factory, mills, hotels, Ernst's Restaurant) labeled, and at least some of the footbridges. Apparently we had a "Dutch Windmill" back in the day. The flow of natural waterways is shown by arrows. Some of the streets are delineated with solid and some with dotted lines, and some with both, which I interpret to refer to the degree to which they are maintained. Best of all are the notations in what would otherwise be open space. "Mesquite." "Cotton Yard." "Cane for Fishing Poles." "Water Melon Field." "Here on this Plain Gen. Sheridan held a Review over 25,000 Cavalry Men to Go to Mexico 1865."
The entire town is not covered - I'll need to cross-reference this map with the one showing the wards - but Mr. Mauermann helpfully drew in arrows to the places he regarded as important. "On Sunday, to San Pedro Springs" (shown in an inset). To the Laurel Hills, to Jonas Beer Garden, to Dignowity Hill, to Powder House, to Cemetery. You can also see what roads would be taken out of town to get to various places - El Paso, Indianola, Seguin, Castroville - and thus, which is what I care about, which roads to take into town from these places.
I always long for overlay maps in these situations. You remember those diagrams of animals you used to find in biology and zoology books, with the outline of the frog or human or whatever on the paper page and a series of clear, stiff pages showing the circulatory system in red, the nerves in blue, the muscles in artistically striated pink, so you can lay them on top of one another in order to see the systems you're interested in relate to each other without interference from the others? Maps should be like that. I want to be able to see the whole city, 1865 in one view, 2010 in another, now all the buildings from this period, now let's look at the bridges, now I need the street names. Nobody makes these. I can't imagine why not (labor and expense being negligible concerns). You could do it digitally and it'd be so cool! Digitally you could blow it up to different scales, too, focus on a single street or the entire town or back up to Bexar County, each of the adjacent counties, now look at the geography, now see the names of propery owners...
Okay, so, I'll never get that. I'll either have to cross reference between maps constantly while writing, or do my own cobbled-together version, with mapping software if I can find one that does what I need or, more probably, hand drawn with numerous scale imperfections. I'm not good at translating what I see into what I draw, as anyone who's tried to read my maps of archeological units will concede. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.
So thank you, Mr. Mauermann!
Maps, like other research materials, are created for purposes not necessarily related to those of the individual researcher. One map I looked at showed few to no geographical features, but consisted entirely of the puzzle pieces of survey plats. A godsend for certain kinds of research; useless to me. One, combining data from an 1868, an 1899, and a 1965 map, was primarily intended to show the locations of vanished businesses and landmarks, such as the Bat Cave (as we called the insecure jail/courthouse of most of the 19th century) and Wm. Gamble's bookstore, in relation to the 20th-century downtown. So it'll be excellent for my location scouting, in one respect; but misleading in another, as it shows modern streets - notably Houston - that didn't exist in my time period, and limited in another, as it doesn't even show all of downtown. The map that shows me the mid-nineteenth century districts or wards of the city doesn't show all the street names. And so on.
The great find of the day was a 1924 blueprint copy of "The City of San Antonio, made in 1868 and 1869 by stepping by A.J. Mauermann." It's confusing at first, because he put east at the top; but once you get oriented this is the bomb! In addition to labeling the river, streets, acequias, and plazas, he's drawn in all the buildings, with the most important ones (churches, schools, gas factory, ice factory, mills, hotels, Ernst's Restaurant) labeled, and at least some of the footbridges. Apparently we had a "Dutch Windmill" back in the day. The flow of natural waterways is shown by arrows. Some of the streets are delineated with solid and some with dotted lines, and some with both, which I interpret to refer to the degree to which they are maintained. Best of all are the notations in what would otherwise be open space. "Mesquite." "Cotton Yard." "Cane for Fishing Poles." "Water Melon Field." "Here on this Plain Gen. Sheridan held a Review over 25,000 Cavalry Men to Go to Mexico 1865."
The entire town is not covered - I'll need to cross-reference this map with the one showing the wards - but Mr. Mauermann helpfully drew in arrows to the places he regarded as important. "On Sunday, to San Pedro Springs" (shown in an inset). To the Laurel Hills, to Jonas Beer Garden, to Dignowity Hill, to Powder House, to Cemetery. You can also see what roads would be taken out of town to get to various places - El Paso, Indianola, Seguin, Castroville - and thus, which is what I care about, which roads to take into town from these places.
I always long for overlay maps in these situations. You remember those diagrams of animals you used to find in biology and zoology books, with the outline of the frog or human or whatever on the paper page and a series of clear, stiff pages showing the circulatory system in red, the nerves in blue, the muscles in artistically striated pink, so you can lay them on top of one another in order to see the systems you're interested in relate to each other without interference from the others? Maps should be like that. I want to be able to see the whole city, 1865 in one view, 2010 in another, now all the buildings from this period, now let's look at the bridges, now I need the street names. Nobody makes these. I can't imagine why not (labor and expense being negligible concerns). You could do it digitally and it'd be so cool! Digitally you could blow it up to different scales, too, focus on a single street or the entire town or back up to Bexar County, each of the adjacent counties, now look at the geography, now see the names of propery owners...
Okay, so, I'll never get that. I'll either have to cross reference between maps constantly while writing, or do my own cobbled-together version, with mapping software if I can find one that does what I need or, more probably, hand drawn with numerous scale imperfections. I'm not good at translating what I see into what I draw, as anyone who's tried to read my maps of archeological units will concede. Like the song says, you can't always get what you want; but if you try sometimes, you'll get what you need.
So thank you, Mr. Mauermann!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
