I Am A Camera

Wow, look at how many places I bicycled last year!

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:34:47 -0500

So, just a few weeks left until it's finally bicycling season again here in Chicago; long-time followers of the moblog, in fact, know that I first got heavily involved with bicycling last year, when not coincidentally I initially quit smoking. Of course, this being nerdy GTD me, I needed to invent an elaborate project for myself in order to justify all that bicycling in the first place; and this was right at the same time (spring 2007) that Google first allowed people to sign up for an account and start creating customized mashup maps through their official API, which convinced me to start doing such a thing too. But alas, because of the complexity of these maps (but more on that in a bit), I ended up doing a lot more trips than I had time to sit down and put together into a mashup; and I promised myself that over the winter I'd finally sit down and finish them, before it was time for bicycling season 2008 and yet more riding/photographing/mapping.

Anyway, it just occurred to me this weekend that I don't have much time left, so I better get started; and the first step, of course, was to sit down and look through all the photos and notes I took last year when actually on the bike trips, and determine exactly how much work I have ahead of me. The good news? It turns out that I actually biked a lot more and a lot farther than I had been remembering in my head, boding well for my chances of even longer and more regular trips this spring and summer. The bad news? I have 11 maps that need to be created, and so far only three of them "done" (and by "done" I of course mean "eh, like 80 percent done").

So, I just sat down on my other Mac (the one with Photoshop) and made a master map of all the mini-projects I'm shooting to finish by the beginning of May; this image, then, will also serve as a master map to interior pages over at the section of my personal website where you can always find the latest grand total of finished mashups. Anyway, so here we go with the descriptions...hold yr breath...

1 through 5: Chicago Lakeshore Path. An uninterrupted 18-mile bike and runner path stretching nearly from the north edge to the south edge of the city, surrounded nearly at all times by public parkland, a holdover from Edwardian times when the "City Beautiful" movement managed to get the entire Chicago lakefront declared a "public resource."

1) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park North. Upper half of the seven-mile Lincoln Park, one of the largest city parks in the entire United States. Riding the length of Lincoln Park is a lesson in American history and architecture, in that the park was designed in regular stages from 1860 to 1960; here in the north half are the sections created between 1910 and the '60s.

2) Lakeshore path: Lincoln Park South. The lower half of the park just described, the sections designed from 1860 to 1900, containing the vast majority of the historical destinations the park is most known for.

3) Lakeshore path: North Avenue to the Loop. Want a smart alternative the next time you come into the inner city for a holiday like the 4th of July? Why not park your car on the northside and bike the rest of the way in? Although not regularly used by a lot of people, there is a perfectly safe and in fact delightful section of the lakefront path that stretches from the end of Lincoln Park to the Loop, including easy stops at Navy Pier, River North, the Chicago River and Millennium Park. It's only six miles from Montrose to the Loop by bicycle; why not try it the next time you're down there on holiday, avoiding the snarl of vehicular traffic that always forms during such events?

4) Lakeshore path: Loop to 57th Street. For many years the Hyde Park area of the city's southside was built up along the lakefront, but nothing else between there and the Loop; that finally changed throughout the mid-20th century, especially once a series of corporations and civic groups came in and sponsored the landscaping of vast tracts of the land. Although not as historic as the northside's better-known path, this slice of Chicago's lakefront is a beautiful and uncluttered space, perfect for lazy weekend rides as well as weekday wind sprints for more serious riders.

5) Lakeshore path: South Campus. The extreme south tip of the city-sponsored 18-mile lakeshore bike/running path, encompassing several historic areas: Hyde Park, the University of Chicago campus, the Museum of Science and Industry, Jackson Park, and the South Shore Cultural Center, spanning roughly 57th to 79th Streets.

6) Northside to the Loop, via Southport/Lincoln Avenues. Hey, city-dweller creative-class fucks! You know how the mayor and your hippie neighbor keep crowing about how easy it actually is to bicycle from your place to your office in the Loop each day? Keep wondering if it's actually true? Here's one of what will hopefully be an always expanding series of maps, looking at various inner-city routes from residential neighborhoods to the Loop, all of them lying along streets with dedicated, legally-protected bike lanes. Featuring not only the routes themselves, but various practical tips about city bicycling embedded in my photos and videos.

7) Northside to the Loop, via Halsted/Milwaukee Avenues. Exactly the same as map 6, but this time using the city bike lane on Halsted, passing through such neighborhoods as Boys Town, Old Town, Goose Island, Fulton Market, River West and more.

8) Burnham's Boulevards and the West Side Parks (north half). As part of the "City Beautiful" movement's 1909 overhaul of the city, architect Daniel Burnham recommended building a "green ring" through the most congested neighborhoods at the time, allowing not only for rapid middle-class development but also a small slice of healthiness in the middle of the most packed places in the city. At the same time, then, a group of Gilded Age entrepreneurs started a series of grand, giant public parks on the west side of the city as well (where the vast majority of the city's immigrants lived at the time); these were linked to Burnham's green boulevard system, to form a legitimate grand green circle all the way around the city's downtown, a few miles out in distance from the Loop's center. My map, then, is just of the north half of this circle; it includes Diversey Boulevard at Lincoln Park (including the Goethe statue, Hamilton garden, Elks headquarters and more), Logan Square, Garfield Park and more.

9) Northside Neighborhood Parks. It's the giant civic parks of the Victorian Age that get all the press in Chicago; but did you know that the park district here actually maintains over 550 public spaces? The vast majority of them, in fact, were created and first maintained by private neighborhood organizations, before the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal consolidated all the groups into one unified government administration. In this map, a winding and detailed route that will take a bicyclist to over 65 small neighborhood parks on the northside, ranging from a mile or two in size to sometimes the length of someone's backyard; the total route lasts 25 miles, with of course many opportunities to stop for food, shopping, coffee and more.

10) Northside to the Westside, via the "Industrial District." Here, a supplemental add-on to either map 6 (inner-city path on Lincoln) or 7 (inner-city path on Halsted) for getting over to such hipster westside neighborhoods as Wicker Park and Bucktown, specifically by riding through the last area of the northside left with working factories, smokestacks and more. A fascinating route to take at least once, especially for those who enjoy photographing urban industrial areas.

11) Near South Historic Neighborhoods. Did you know that there are half a dozen nationally important historic neighborhoods all butting against each other in Chicago's Near South Side? There are! Here, a map detailing them all, including the IIT campus, Bronzeville, Prairie Avenue, the Museum Campus, Chinatown, Printers Row and the South Loop.

Whew, okay, that's it! And three of these are now "done," like I said (i.e. 80 percent done), which you can find over here for now; and hopefully by May, like I said, I'm going to have all 11 of these maps finished and online, and with downloadable KMLs as well for Google Earth (for those who like their maps in 3D and spinnable and all that shit), and with a brand-new interface as well over at the section of my personal site where people will be able to find all these. And that's it! See you later, fuckers!

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Hey hey! It's an audio blog entry!

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:01:29 -0500

Fivethings

Jason Pettus: Personal audio

I decided for some reason to do an audio report for this personal blog of mine, posted here above; but I'm also aware of how much time such online audio reports suck up, especially personal navel-gazing ones like this, which is why I deliberately kept it to under seven and a half minutes (even though I promise in the actual podcast that I would keep it under six -- I know, I failed!). Five topics are covered here: the new Movable Type 4 installation that will be happening at my main personal site soon; how to send me audio comments for the CCLaP Podcast if you want; a general thanks to CCLaP readers, and befuddlement over why there's not more feedback there; a formal apology for the continued delays with my customized bicycle maps I've been creating this year, and an explanation for why they're so late to begin with; and an open plea for more submissions of artistic work to CCLaP, given that I will finally be opening the Flash-based virtual photography gallery later this month, and of course publishing the center's first paper book (a cutting-edge novel) this winter. Enjoy the smug self-satisfaction, everyone!

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Second bike map finished! Come tour Lincoln Park North with me!

nobody@vox.com(jasonpettus) — Mon, 14 May 2007 10:14:46 -0500

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Regular readers know that last week, I successfully finished my first-ever customized bike map, for use in both Google Maps (2D) and Google Earth (3D), that one covering the southern two-thirds of Chicago's Lincoln Park. Well, this weekend I finished up my second map as well, which I'm happy to now present to the public; it covers the northern third of Lincoln Park that the first map doesn't, meaning that both maps together now comprehensively cover the entire 14-mile round trip. For those who don't know, the northern third of Lincoln Park constitutes the third official expansion of the park over the years, originally created between the 1930s and '50s; it's not nearly as historical as the southern half, of course, nor as grandiose, and exists more for daily benefit by various neighborhood locals than for out-of-town tourism. Nonetheless, this section of the park does contain some items of general interest as well, including the Jose Rizal Memorial, Montrose Harbor, Margate Fieldhouse and more, not to mention the northern terminus of both the lakefront bike path and the vehicular Lake Shore Drive.

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As always, the map is interesting enough when viewing in its 2D online form, through the static Google Maps; where things really start getting mind-bending, though, is when you import the KML file into the 3D Google Earth and take a look that way. Seriously, I just cannot get over yet what a freaky mindjob it is to see one's customized maps in full, stunning 3D glory, with the ability to spin that map and twist it whichever way you want, or perhaps zoom to ground level and traverse the path as if you were actually biking it. Combined with just how easy it is to actually make these maps, it is a flabbergasting new development from Google indeed.

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Even better, though (and again, just like last time), it is super-easy to embed media such as photos, videos, text and hyperlinks into one's placemarks, and this info shows up just as easily in Google Earth as it does when you click on one online in Google Maps. It's the final kick to this new service that officially makes it brilliant; it's what turns this customized mapping ability from a fun toy into something much more powerful, almost like a working version of virtual reality. (Don't forget, by the way, all of today's screenshots can be clicked on, to see much larger versions.)

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By the way, I figured something out in Google Earth yesterday that hadn't occurred to me before: that if you import both Lincoln Park files I've now made, you can simply turn them both on within Earth at once, allowing you to do the full tour of the park without interruption. I highly recommend checking out the files for the first time in this way! I'm all excited, to tell you the truth, about the opportunity to present a little of Chicago to worldwide strangers in this fashion; I think it's an amazing way to check out a slice of a city a tourist might not normally see, and especially someone who's never gotten a chance to visit Chicago in the first place. As word of these customization tools start spreading, and more and more people start making them for the cities in which they live, I can't wait to see what ends up appearing in the big Google database.

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And of course, don't forget to turn on the '3D Buildings' layer as well in Google Earth, when viewing my maps; Chicago is one of something like 30 cities now for which Google owns sophisticated 3D information concerning thousands of its buildings (and not just the Loop, either, but going all the way up to Belmont). It adds to the surrealism even more, and especially when you own a powerful computer and can navigate such a virtual environment in real time.

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In essence, it turns the entire thing into not just a scrapbook-style sharing experience, but also a powerful education/entertainment one, like the proverbial "encyclopedia come to life!" that giddy sci-fi documentaries have been promising us for decades, but that no one has yet delivered on. Check out this three-image series above, for example, from one section of my southern map; how you can click on a placemark to get sophisticated multimedia info on a specific spot, or click on the line itself to get the same kind of info concerning that entire section of the park. And this is just a silly little bike map of a small tourist area of Chicago; imagine now applying these new tools to the location of a historic battle, or Egyptian tombs, or a thousand other things I'm sure people will be cooking up over the upcoming months.

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Or if entrepreneurialism is your thing, why not think of the possibilities along those lines that this suddenly presents? Take this shot, for example, of the commercial North Pond Cafe, which happens to lie inside the government property of Lincoln Park, and which already exists as a 3D building within Google Earth, just a gray, featureless one? Now imagine if the owners of the cafe hired someone (like me, for example) to go into Sketchup and create a photorealistic version of the building, as well as a placemark containing photos, video, cafe information and a link to their website. Even better, hire the person to create an information-rich map of the entire North Pond area, including the Nature Museum and more; then suddenly your KML file becomes what the marketers call a "value-added advertising experience," something that actually adds to the quality of your customers' lives, not just screams messages at them. Such a thing is currently available in Google Earth to any company on the planet, right this moment; it's also available to arts organizations, neighborhood associations, historical societies, even individuals with too much time on their hands, as I have already so woefully proven.

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So what's my third map going to cover? Well, the West Side Park system, to be specific, as well as the historic boulevards hooking them together; I'm going out in just another day or two, in fact, to take the photos and videos. I was going to write out a little background behind what I'll be viewing, but now I'm too tired; just go read the Wikipedia entry on Douglas Park if you're interested. Anyway, if I stop where that red placemarker is above, which is technically the end of the actual parks, that'd be a total of 14 miles, when you factor in the distance from my apartment to the start of the system; there's an el stop there where the placemarker is too, making for an easy commute back to my place. If I still have the energy, though, I'm going to extend the trip to 20 miles, by biking due east to the lakefront there at Roosevelt Avenue, and taking a tour of the South Museum Campus (Field Natural History Museum, Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium); then I'll finally end the trip at Jackson and State, the location of an Intelligentsia Coffeehouse, for which I happen to have a frequent-customer card to turn in, and then catch the train there instead to go home. Wish me luck!

Once again, here is the link for my Lincoln Park North map, and here is the Lincoln Park South one; once there, simply click on the "KML" link in the upper-right corner to download the 3D Google Earth file.

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