Leventhal Map &amp; Education Center

Our Where Workshop will be officially opening this Friday, October 30! Where Workshop is a hands-on discovery lab for geography, history, civics, and more.

This new collections-based learning experience opens up questions about geographic inquiry and invites learners into the practice of place-based discovery.

Through the prism of maps, primary sources, and visual evidence, you'll learn about continuity and change in the place we call Boston in the past, present, and future—and leave with a perspective that you can bring to bear on the places you care about.

Urban planners, and transportation planners in particular, have tested all sorts of techniques for modeling how people move through cities.

These maps of greater Chicago, with their starbursts of white lines etched against a dark background, exemplify how early computer cartography was seen as a promising technique for processing this kind of data.

The maps trace “desire lines”—defined in the study as “the shortest line between origin and destination”—among origin and destination points for three different modes of transportation: the subway-elevated rapid transit system (Figure 18), public buses (Figure 20), and automobiles (Figure 22).

Created by the Defense Mapping Agency in 1982, this chart forecasts the winding paths that the Challenger space shuttle would follow during an upcoming six-day journey through earth’s orbit.

Challenger’s orbits as part of the mission STS-7 are printed on both the front and back of this map with a unique categorical symbology that draws routes using a series of numbers corresponding to the respective orbit.

As part of their work on STS-7, the crew—including Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space—deployed a $13 million multispectral scanning satellite called SPAS-01, designed to remotely sense resources on Earth’s surface at a high resolution.

In this site plan, created by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) in 1968, color becomes political. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, the BRA made hundreds of these urban renewal maps for various redevelopment projects in Boston.

In the promotional booklet shown on the following slides, the drafting company Keuffel & Esser write, “The point is, a multi-color map—imaginatively conceived and skillfully produced—gains a graphic impact important to the selling function.

It moves beyond the simple purpose of orientation and becomes a marketing tool.” In this case, the methods of map production can be directly traced to transformative (and even destructive) urban policies.

These projects were often fraught, as they tended to target lower-income and nonwhite neighborhoods, displacing the people who lived in them. With the right colors, however, urban renewal could look more welcoming—and the company that sold scribe films to the BRA understood this point.

Check out this interactive tool by Richard Ellis that shows the network infrastructure of the Southern California Edison Company! It is part of the Map Chat series commissioned by Richard Pegg, Director and Curator of the MacLean Collection in Illinois and be visited on our website.

Sneak peek, anyone? 👀🗺️ Where Workshop is almost here, and we couldn’t wait. Swing by the Leventhal Center gallery for public preview days, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm: 📍 Friday, October 16 📍 Saturday, October 17 📍 Friday, October 23 📍 Saturday, October 24

We will officially open and resume regular hours on October 30, 2026.

This case highlights transitions from the use of analog cartographic drafting tools and precise drafting compasses shown above towards processes and gadgets that could create, analyze, and visualize geospatial data in a fraction of the time it would take for human hands to do the same tasks.

In the pre-computer period, the most-used tools in a cartographer’s toolbox were ones that helped create precise line widths, exact curves, and standardized shapes or lettering.

Today, some of these tools will only be recognizable to many modern cartographers as icons that appear in buttons as part of software used to make maps—a familiar concept to those who recognize the floppy disk as a common icon for the “Save” button in many modern software tools.

What can maps tell us about a city’s cultural life—and what do they leave out?

perceptions of a city's cultural life. This free showing will be held Friday, October 16 in the Leventhal Center gallery with a staff member from the Leventhal Center and Jameson Johnson available to answer questions.

Registration not required, drop by our gallery any time between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm!

What can maps tell us about a city’s cultural life—and what do they leave out?

For this edition of From the Vault, Jameson Johnson , founder and executive director of Boston Art Review, brings together eight objects from the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s collections exploring how Boston’s cultural landscape has been documented, navigated, and imagined over time.

Drawing connections to Boston Art Radar, an initiative mapping the region’s arts and cultural spaces, Johnson examines how maps reveal patterns of investment and development, the conditions that allow cultural spaces to take root and survive, and how decisions about what gets mapped shape public..

One of the most famous maps in the Leventhal Center’s collections, this whale chart was created by Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury in 1851 to show the distribution of different whale species and the best seasons for hunting them.

Though more than 130 years apart, both this map and Resources on Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals rely on the convention of a systematic grid and a combination of color and pictorial symbols to create a simple way of encoding geographic observations.

Did you know Massachusetts is home to the oldest fishing community settled by Europeans in what is now the United States? This 1831 map of Cape Ann by cartographer John Mason gives insight into a bustling maritime industry that has thrived in the area since early colonial settlements.

The land is marked with roads, towns, and other topographical features, but most detail is given to the surrounding waters. The small numbers around harbors and shorelines indicate the water’s depth in fathoms, a nautical unit equaling six feet.

Mason added outlines to show obstacles like shoals, sandbars, and rock formations, and marked lighthouses and anchorages. The map includes everything a person might need to navigate, land or sea, revealing the key role maritime activity played in Cape Ann’s history.

In doing so, the colonists targeted the Pawtucket and expropriated their land. The settlement grew and became the town of Gloucester in 1642. Mason illustrates some of Cape Ann’s heavily wooded areas, which were put to use for ship building and fueled commercial fishing and trading.

Other maritime businesses came as a result, and soon Gloucester secured its reputation as a fishing and ship building capital. The peninsula also had a thriving granite industry in the nineteenth century, which drew an influx of immigrants looking to work in the quarries; notice the rocky shorelines

Prior to the arrival of European colonists, the Pawtucket (or Agawam) people were already making use of the land and ocean for farming and fishing. After learning of the abundant codfish in the waters, the English founded a settlement on the coast of Cape Ann and fishing operations began.

In this 1965 photograph, a woman encodes data into a Hollerith card machine. The data creation process began with a clerk—often a woman, as this kind of technical work was typically carried out by women working at lower wages—who produced data by manually punching holes into small cards.

Early computer mapping programs like this were often written in a programming language called FORTRAN, which required data to be input from physical punched cards. Betty Benson was responsible for the actual programming of SYMAP, though Howard Fisher is frequently given credit for its creation.

At this time, women played central roles in computerized map production, though their work was frequently ignored or acknowledged only in passing. In the Computer Atlas of Kenya, Taylor thanks “Mrs. Susan Richer” for her assistance “in programming and data processing.”

When enough cards had been punched, they would be fed to a Hollerith card reader, which summarized the data. When D.R.F. Taylor created the Computer Atlas of Kenya, he used a program called SYMAP, developed at Harvard’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis (LCGSA) in the 1960s.

A growing economy demanded space for facilities like rail yards and port facilities, as shown here on this map from a government report on how to manage the city’s industrial geography.

On the peripheries of South Boston and East Boston, proposals are shown for port facilities stretching out into the tidelands. The South Boston flats would eventually become today’s Seaport district, while the East Boston flats would become Logan Airport.

Near the yards indicated by yellow and orange at the very center of the map lay neighborhoods like the South Cove and the lower South End, both of which were densely crowded with substandard housing for the working-class families whose labor was indispensable to the industrial system.

A growing economy demanded space for facilities like rail yards and port facilities, as shown here on this map from a government report on how to manage the city’s industrial geography.

The blue and yellow area between Cambridge, Somerville, and Charlestown shows the massive rail yards that occupied the filled land formerly at the mouth of the Miller’s River.

During our recent exhibition "Declarations: Printing a New Nation" we asked patrons where in Boston they would read the Declaration of Independence if it came out today.

We sent our head curator, Garrett Dash Nelson, on a world tour (via Photoshop) to read this Boston-printed broadside of the Declaration in some of the locations you suggested.

Our walls are filling up! We’ve heard about family legacies, first homes, and favorite local attractions—and we want to hear from you too. Share Your Where today! Go to atlascope.org to capture your favorite historic view. Then, donate to our programs and we’ll display your view and caption.

Created by Jesuit priest and scholar Athanasius Kircher, this intriguing map of the earth was included in his 1665 treatise “Mundus Subterraneus.” Kircher’s early theories combined religion and science, and looked to scripture for evidence in Earth’s formation.

This map depicts all bodies of water on Earth connected by a system of underground waterways. Oceanic whirlpools feed these channels, while mountain springs derive water from these resources, creating a cycle of water above and below ground.

Kircher also placed a large ball of fire in the center of the earth, suggesting that this inferno causes lava and water to rise from Earth’s interior.

🏫 Welcome to back-to-school season! Every day, we see more college students on the Green Line and herds of elementary schoolers at the BPL. Here at the Leventhal Center we’re busy setting up our new Where Workshop, a reimagining of our gallery to activate geographic learning for all visitors.