Did you ever look at a map of your neighborhood and say, “Wow, I never noticed that street," or "I never thought of that stream as a feature.”
This is what gets Alex B. Hill up every morning.
Hill is the principal of DETROITography, an organization that provides data resources for city residents. A cartographer and information designer, Hill likes looking at Michigan places and giving us new lenses for seeing and understanding those places.
His new book, "Great Lakes in 50 Maps," looks at our freshwater features and the land that surrounds them, and how that interplay affects how people live.
"As I was thinking about this book that's what really came back to me is how much the Great Lakes are really a part of all of us," said Hill. "We're 90 percent water. We're the Great Lakes, we're just walking around!"
Hill's book includes maps of indigenous names for the lakes, treaties and land rights around the Great Lakes, Underground Railroad stops, and shipwrecks in the inland seas, to name a few.
One of Hill's favorite maps may be the map of lake monsters and legends like "Nessie" and "Bessie" among oversized turtles and panthers. But just like sightings of mythical beasts, old maps can be hard to read for the truth. Hill said he finds in his research that old maps aren't very accurate to today's cartographic understanding of our world.
"A lot of them are a fantasyland," laughed Hill. "That really shows off how frontier of a location Michigan and the area around the Great Lakes was at the time of the creations of those maps. Even the misconception that the Great Lakes were the passage to Asia, and no one understood how big these Great Lakes were. They were so big that people assumed they must be an ocean."
You can see all of Hill's maps including lighthouses on the lakes, football loyalty by region, and population density around the Great Lakes in his new book "Great Lakes in 50 Maps" from Arcadia Publishing.
