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Dan Sinker heads up the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews project for Mozilla. From 2008-2011 he taught in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago where he focused on entrepreneurial journalism and the mobile web. He is the author of the popular @MayorEmanuel twitter account and is the creator of the election tracker the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, the mobile storytelling project CellStories, and was the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet until its closure in 2007. He is the editor of We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews and was a 2007-08 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. He occasionally blogs about media for the Huffington Post.

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transitmaps: Historical Map: Chicago Plan Commission - Rapid Transit Facilities, 1945 Here’s a gorgeous pre-CTA planning map from Chicago in 1945, outlining all sorts of grandiose ideas for expansion of the subway system, almost none of which have actually come to pass. There appears to be a proposed second Loop, which would have run more east-west than the existing one. There’s also a planned subway line heading out to the northwest, but this doesn’t follow the same alignment as the Blue Line, and a subway line running along Belmont Avenue. Have we been there? Yes. What we like: Awesome old-school cartography at its finest. The shading to show the city limits is quite beautiful. The map looks gorgeous at larger sizes (click through to take a look!) What we don’t like: Limited use of colour (almost certainly due to wartime austerity measures) does make some detail hard to make out. The blobs on the “L” lines don’t represent stations; it’s just the type of linework used to differentiate it from other lines, such as roads. Our rating: A glimpse at what might have been, but never was. Fantastic! Four-and-a-half-stars. (Source: Eric Fischer/Flickr)

transitmaps:

Historical Map: Chicago Plan Commission - Rapid Transit Facilities, 1945

Here’s a gorgeous pre-CTA planning map from Chicago in 1945, outlining all sorts of grandiose ideas for expansion of the subway system, almost none of which have actually come to pass. There appears to be a proposed second Loop, which would have run more east-west than the existing one. There’s also a planned subway line heading out to the northwest, but this doesn’t follow the same alignment as the Blue Line, and a subway line running along Belmont Avenue.

Have we been there? Yes.

What we like: Awesome old-school cartography at its finest. The shading to show the city limits is quite beautiful. The map looks gorgeous at larger sizes (click through to take a look!)

What we don’t like: Limited use of colour (almost certainly due to wartime austerity measures) does make some detail hard to make out. The blobs on the “L” lines don’t represent stations; it’s just the type of linework used to differentiate it from other lines, such as roads.

Our rating: A glimpse at what might have been, but never was. Fantastic! Four-and-a-half-stars.

4.5 Stars!

(Source: Eric Fischer/Flickr)

94 notes

  1. benpassikoff reblogged this from transitmaps
  2. jmchau reblogged this from fuckyeahcartography
  3. scoticus reblogged this from transitmaps
  4. saila reblogged this from sinker
  5. ginamak reblogged this from sinker
  6. sinker reblogged this from transitmaps
  7. shostapovich reblogged this from fuckyeahcartography
  8. gothistory reblogged this from fuckyeahcartography
  9. onlytheparanoidsurvive reblogged this from fuckyeahcartography and added:
    *drools*
  10. thenextstation reblogged this from fuckyeahcartography and added:
    Always reblog the Chicago L.
  11. dignified-and-old reblogged this from fuckyeahcartography
  12. fuckyeahcartography reblogged this from transitmaps
  13. petchmo reblogged this from transitmaps and added:
    A great map of what the city could have become.
  14. lukerson reblogged this from transitmaps
  15. jdunlevy reblogged this from gapers
  16. bisouadieu reblogged this from gapers
  17. snack-tray reblogged this from gapers
  18. gapers reblogged this from samarov and added:
    Very cool.
  19. thenumbereleven11 reblogged this from kartemquin
  20. mcbudd reblogged this from wnyc
  21. webeginattheend reblogged this from transitmaps
  22. trotskitty reblogged this from earthfix
  23. earthfix reblogged this from wnyc and added:
    Interesting Chicago Transit Authority planning map showing how they had intended to expand the subway system.
  24. atomicovermind reblogged this from transitmaps and added:
    Of interest to kennethhite…