What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the March 23 edition of the Frommer’s Travel Show podcast. To listen, click here.
Pauline Frommer: Welcome to the Frommer’s Travel Podcast. Andrew Middleton is the owner of a map store called The Map Center in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. But he has such an interesting story I wanted to have him here on The Frommer’s Travel Show. Hey, Andrew, welcome to The Frommer’s Travel Show.
Andrew Middletown: Hey, thank you so much for having me.
PF: So how did you become the owner of this venerable store?
AM: Yeah, you got it. Well, so the Map Center has been around since 1953. It has always been in Rhode Island, used to be down the street in Providence, and it had three owners. The third one was in a position to retire a few years ago.
I think a lot of people come into the store and they wonder, how is a map store still being a thing? Well, the third owner was also struggling with that question for a long time. Around 2017, if you were a good customer, the owner might have casually offered it to you or tried to sell it. So he kind of had one foot out the door for a while.
In 2023 he [wrote content for] an article in the Providence Journal and it basically said: hey, if you want to be the owner of a—euphemistically, let’s call it a “pre-successful map store”—send me an email and maybe I’ll give it to you.
At the time, I was living in Oakland, California, on the other side of the country. So the only reason that I heard about this story is because I was on Twitter with all of my map nerd friends and we were passing around this article, which just read like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like, wouldn’t everyone fantasize about getting to own a map store? How fanciful is that?
I’ve been a cartographer for about 12 years. I’ve made maps for environmental consulting firms, large utility companies. I worked at Apple Maps for a hot minute. It’s all been interesting, but when I saw this newspaper article about the Map Center, it activated my curiosity and it made me think about having a new job that was more creative or would have opportunities for trying new things. It’s just too cool not to try.
PF: You were one of 100 people who applied for this, so this appealed to a lot of folks.
AM: It appealed to a lot of folks in the same way that I think running an independent bookstore appeals to a lot of people. But there’s a reason there isn’t an independent bookstore on every street corner. It turns out it’s actually, just like, a really hard thing to do.
So the third owner, Andy, the gentleman who bequeathed to me the Map Center, he got a lot of responses and not all of them were very serious. Not all of them were [from] people who knew what they were doing. I would say that I didn’t really know what I was doing, but maybe I knew a little bit more than most folks, having come out of the cartographic industry.
PF: So you wrote a letter to the old Andrew owner. What do you think it was in your letter that made him decide to give this to you?
AM: There were a few things… I wrote about all the different ways that maps can be an important part of people’s lives. In an age where Google and Apple and Microsoft, the largest corporations on the planet, [are] giving away information, you can’t be in the business of selling information…. [But] you can sell information as a story. I try to sell the experience of traveling without your phone, navigating through the forest without needing the glow of your smartphone on all the time. The wonder of thinking about the fun places that you’re going to go to. The nostalgia of thinking about the places that you used to hang out in, but maybe you can’t go back to anymore. Maps and traveling—it’s all about feeling. And that’s why people have such a powerful connection to maps.
A friend of mine once called me a map philosopher. And I think what tickled that third owner’s curiosity about me in particular is that I am somebody who thinks a lot about this, not just as a collector, but as someone who thinks about what maps mean.
PF: All right, well, let’s go into what maps mean. As you say, it’s hard to sell information that’s available for free. So if a map is not information, it could be, I guess, a thing of beauty. I know a lot of people frame maps because the drawing of them and the colors and the type of paper has so much intrinsic beauty to it. But then there are other maps that allow you to understand the world in a different way. And those are maps that you sell. So can you tell us about some of those?
AM: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. The point of a map is to say something. It has a message and that message is, when you get down to it, information. But wouldn’t you rather consume that information in the form of a map than to have it written out in text? Sometimes.
Some of my favorite maps—I’m just looking around the store right now—I think this one’s particularly relevant to your purposes. They’re maps of the United States made by the Soviet Union in the ’70s and ’80s. Basically, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were all of these military bases across the Soviet Bloc, in like Poland and Belarus, and when the army left, they left a lot of stuff behind. [That] included top secret maps that were made of the world by the Soviet army. These were not necessarily invasion maps. [But] they’re also not not invasion maps. But if you’re claiming to be a world superpower, it is your responsibility to know about the rest of the world whether you intend to conquer it or not. It’s a flex. You know, it is a demonstration of intelligence and power.
And the reason that I have these maps and the reason that I’m so excited about them… is seeing a map of a place that you’re from, from an outsider perspective, from the perspective of someone that, at one point, you may have called an enemy, is a really different way of looking at the world.
We in the United States are very used to being the mappers. We’re not used to being the mapped. But every time we go someplace new that doesn’t speak English, but we’re reading our map in English, there’s a good chance that that map is not by the people that you are visiting on your travels.
PF: Can I ask you about these Soviet-era maps? Are they surprising or do they simply show the topography you would expect them to show? Or do they show military bases? I mean, what makes them interesting?
AM: Well, first of all, I think seeing familiar places with names printed in Cyrillic is always sort of interesting. To see the familiar in a manner that feels exotic is always intriguing. I think a lot of what we hope to experience when we travel is to see something new in the mundane. You know, to see what, what it’s like to just get groceries in another place, you know, to live in another place.
And then to see that fresh perspective sort of superimposed on the things that are boring and mundane and the things that we experience all the time. To see that, to see that little old Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is worthy of someone else’s surveying and detailed attention!
It kind of reminds me of like going to a state fair and getting your caricature done. If you want to know what is distinctive about your face, let somebody else exaggerate parts of it and see what parts like stand out. And it’s like, oh, I didn’t realize, but I do have kind of a kind of a funny shaped nose.
I love that getting getting a map made by somebody else is like the ultimate caricature. It’s like getting a selfie with an Instagram filter on it. People love seeing images of themselves reflected back to them in new ways.
PF: I learned about you through an article in the Boston Globe, and they talked about Decolonial Atlas. Can you tell us what that is?
AM: The Decolonial Atlas is a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to making maps from an Indigenous perspective. So this is this is another one of those cases where here are people being mapped and there are people making the maps. And the Decolonial Atlas is all about helping the people who, for most of history, have been mapped, helping them turn into the mappers and to see, again, a familiar place that you think you know well, through somebody else’s eyes. That’s often just such a joy. I love a map that makes your brain leak out of your ears a little bit.
[One of its maps] is called Turtle Island Decolonized by the Decolonial Atlas. It is a map of North America rotated 90 degrees… I love holding this map up to folks and say, like, “Have you been to Turtle Island? Are you familiar with this place?” And they’d be like, “No, I’ve never been to Turtle Island.” And then you give it even a 90 degree rotation, you’re like, “Ah, it’s the place I’ve lived my entire life.” Just the simple act of rotating the map 90 degrees makes something so familiar, so unrecognizable.
And then on top of that, all of the place names on this map are in the local Native American language. Many of them are familiar, most of them are not. Some of them are even written in the indigenous alphabet, including several silver alphabets made by tribes in the far north of Canada.
[During] my public school education in the United States, I saw lots of maps of indigenous people, but they were all made by European Americans. The story of Native Americans was always like a story of what this group of people did to them. It’s not really about their self-expression of their experience.
PF: You know, I was recently in Denver and I went to one of the best history museums, I think, in this country. It’s called History Colorado. One of the exhibits was about a terrible, terrible massacre that occurred [in the state] and the wall text was all from the point of view of the people who had been massacred. [It included sections that stated that] the invaders came to create the “illegal city of Denver”. [The language was framed as] “We did this and we did that.” And just with the simple use of the word “we”— it totally flips your perspective. You, the museum goer, are now part of the people who were invaded in this way and who were massacred in the vicinity of Denver. It makes the story far more personal, even if you are not of that heritage. I thought it was very, very powerful the way they did it.
PF: And it sounds like these maps have the same effect.
AM: Yeah. Oh, I mean, that’s a profound story. And I now I’m really eager to go back to Denver to see that museum.
PF: You also have maps showing redlining, which is an invisible mapping that can transform communities, right? Tell us about some of those maps. And for those who don’t know what redlining is, if you could define it.
AM: Yeah, certainly. So in the 1930s, as part of the Roosevelt Administration’s trying to revive the American economy after the Great Depression, there was an organization dedicated to helping banks make, quote unquote, “better decisions.” I mean, the stock market had crashed. Banks didn’t have a whole lot of money. The federal government was trying to stabilize everything. One way that they decided to stabilize things is to help banks make what they perceive to be better financial decisions about which types of communities were good investments and which were not.
So the government made maps that would say, this community here, it is full of people that we intrinsically do not trust. They are immigrants. They are Black people. They are people who do not speak English. They are not Protestant. These are groups of people that we don’t think that if we lent them money, we would not get that money back.
And then at this other community, well, these are people that we feel like are more reliable. These people are going to be better investments. You’re going to loan them money. You’re going to get your money back.
PF: I didn’t know that history.
AM: At the time, it was seen as fairly neutral. It wasn’t explicitly about race.
And it’s like a lot of this, a lot of stuff in this country is that, is that it’s not necessarily mustache twirling evil villain people. It’s people who think of themselves as being neutral when in reality, they, by creating these maps of areas of higher or lower profitability, effectively it meant that if you were a renter in one community, there’s a higher degree of probability that you’d be able to buy your home, and turn that home into generational wealth that would earn you money and would provide a more stable life. And if you were in an area that was harder to get a loan from, you might be stuck renting and your kids might be stuck renting. And the money in your community would be siphoned off to landlords somewhere else. And if you look at these areas that were deemed bad investments in the 1930s, oftentimes they’re still rough parts of town. Or they’re rough parts of town [where] the development was so cheap that more moneyed interests could come in and buy up those properties and begin stages of gentrification… So neighborhoods were demolished, highway overpasses were expanded, luxury condominiums were added.
But I don’t love antique maps. There are lots of antique map stores around. I enjoy visiting them. I don’t want to compete with them. I think they’re doing a great job.
I’m trying to do something different. I want to focus on the new maps. The reason that I still have some of these old maps is because some of these old maps are telling stories that are very present today. Those redlining maps have an impact on the neighborhoods that I live in today. They affect my neighbors. When I talk about the difference between information and a good story, I could tell you that story in a way that is a lot more visceral and makes a connection, and makes you really think about why your neighbors are the people that they are.
PF: Yeah. I love the fact that you’re also supporting storytellers who are using maps this way today. For example, Rebecca Solnit is a wonderful author who has recently turned to mapping in many of her books, and she gives a feminist spin, often, not always, but often, with her work with maps. Can you talk a little bit about her?
AM: Certainly, and first, I’ll say that map making is hard. It’s a labor-intensive practice, and it’s a lot easier now that we have computers, and there’s free software out there. To make a map today is much more accessible than it used to be 200 years ago. [Then] if you wanted to make a map, you needed a theodolite, an education, you need to be literate. Depending on where you are, that might be a rare thing. You needed investment fund money. You needed the time to wander around, sometimes on a ship. Map making is an extraordinarily resource-intensive activity.
PF: What is this, theodolite?
AM: Oh, it’s a telescope on a tripod with a protractor. It’s a thing that you use to measure angles between things and measure distances. The Founding Fathers were all about it because they were all landowners and they liked to be science-y, and one way that you could do that is by delineating your property. Many of the Founding Fathers, like Thomas Jefferson, they would just walk around their property all the time measuring it.
But all that to say is that the way that you had access to capital in order to make a map [so] you had to be either extraordinarily rich, or you had to be connected to an insurance company, or government, or a military, or a state agency.
What I love about Rebecca Solnit’s work is that because map making today is in many ways easier because of software, and because the way that we access information has changed, map making can come from more places. It doesn’t have to come from a corporation or a government anymore. It can be made by artists. It can be made by writers. In the case of Rebecca Solnit, it can come from both, a frustratingly talented person.
PF: Yes, I love her. She’s amazing.
AM: That she just waltzed right into my field and crushed it. But she works very closely with a number of artists, cartographers. It’s very collaborative work.
I used to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Rebecca Solnit is an adopted San Franciscan. One of my favorite maps there is called Monarchs and Queens. It’s a map of San Francisco with all of the native butterfly habitat of the city and all of the queer public spaces overlaid on top of each other.
Those things don’t have a whole lot in common, but it’s a beautiful juxtaposition. So much of the Infinite Cities trilogy, which she wrote… is about putting information together that you wouldn’t necessarily into it putting together and telling interesting stories that have never been told before.
But the thing that keeps me forever curious and inspired by cartography is you never get bored of a place. You just find new ways to see it again.
You can see the old version. You can see the railroad version. You can see the corporate version. You could see the advertising version. You could see the one designed for tourists far away. You can see the one that’s made for the engineers who are building the sewer system.
There are so many different ways to love a place.
PF: That’s great. Well, thank you so much, Andrew. It’s been so much fun speaking with you.
AM: Pauline, what a delight. Thanks so much.
A new episode of Pauline Frommer’s travel podcast, The Frommer’s Travel Show, is released every Sunday.