192 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
Just as Harlem was known as the capital of black
America in the interwar era, New York assumed
itself to be the nation’s cultural and financial center.
By any measure, this assertion was hard to dispute,
but it also fostered a rather notorious insularity that
is gently mocked by Daniel K. Wallingford’s popular
comic map of the 1930s.
Wallingford was from Indianapolis, and followed
his father’s path by pursuing a degree in architecture
before serving in World War I. Thereafter he spent
time in New England, and drew a map to poke fun
at the elitism and self-importance among Bostonians.
After moving to New York, he drew an elaborate
pictorial view of “Architectural Manhattan,” which
demonstrated his talent for artistic design and
execution. From there he returned to satirical
mapping, this time imagining the country as seen by
New Yorkers. Yet in mapping New York’s geographical
provincialism, Wallingford pointed out a much more
general—and rather profound—human tendency to
see the world in self-referential terms.
With a bird’s-eye view and in a pictorial style,
Wallingford drew the country according to perception
rather than geographical scale. Most egregious
are the locational errors: Yellowstone is placed in
Colorado, Denver in Utah, and Nebraska in Illinois,
while Montana abuts Alaska. The Great Lakes are
all mixed up—and even include the Great Salt
Lake—while St. Paul lies just south of Chicago and
Milwaukee. To a New Yorker, Wallingford suggests,
it matters not: everything is somewhere “out west.”
Small vignettes serve as pointed remarks on these
geographical stereotypes: oil and cowboys in Texas,
movies in Southern California, and the auto industry
in Detroit. But perhaps most revealing of all is the
treatment of urban life more generally. However
misplaced, cities appear on the map, while absolute
THE MAPS IN OUR HEADS
Daniel K. Wallingford, “A New Yorker’s
Idea of the United States of America,”
1939
geographical space is obliterated. The Great Plains
are completely absent, an entire region that failed to
register in the minds of New Yorkers. Instead, while
the area east of the Mississippi River bears some
passing resemblance to actual geography, west of
the river we find a foreshortened land that simply
skips over the vast interior.
Further, note that the five boroughs dwarf their
New England and mid-Atlantic neighbors. The only
other place on the map given the same attention
is Florida, which figured prominently in the New
York imagination. Miami and (presumably) Miami
Beach are acknowledged as the vacation playground
for New Yorkers, but beyond that confusion reigns
regarding Nashville and New Orleans. To the west,
three “Swanee Rivers” flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
The map has a deceptively simple—even
innocent—appearance, but it reveals crucial
dynamics that are by no means unique to New
Yorkers. Regardless of our origins, all of us construct
mental maps that govern our sense of value and
distance, and situate us in the larger scheme of
things. To his lasting credit, Wallingford was able to
translate these slippery yet meaningful impressions
expressed by New Yorkers into visual form. Perhaps
his Midwestern roots gave him the distance to
appreciate this northeastern geographical myopia.
Wallingford first published the map in the early
1930s, and was soon producing several different sizes
to meet public demand. The map was widely reissued
as a souvenir of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, which
drew 44 million visitors to witness “the world
of tomorrow” at Flushing Meadows. That
Wallingford’s map remains relevant and funny
indicates how deeply entrenched these regional
attitudes and geographical perceptions can be.
How else to explain the enduring popularity of Saul
Steinberg’s similar “View of the World from 9th
Avenue,” the iconic cover of the New Yorker from 1976?
Both Wallingford and Steinberg may owe their ideas
to an even earlier model: John McCutcheon’s similar
“New Yorker’s Idea of the Map of the United States,”
which appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1922.