004: Sinking City 111 / The Routes
Our Sinking City 111 course map - a composite of the original peninsula topography, the current street grid and fill areas, and the 15 neighborhoods we’ll run through. Big thanks to Lisa Shealy and Peace of Land for all her efforts to create this map and the intense data analysis and map layering behind it.
We needed a blueprint, a menu, a map showing us just how to eat this elephant. Running 111 miles is one thing if its a straight line - but this elephant’s different. It’s hundreds trunks and tails, criss-crossing in every direction. Some dead-ending, some circling back on themselves. Even though we’ve been running this city for over 20 years, we anticipate our fair share of “where the hell are we’s.” We needed a plan, a way to break our project into a kit of parts. We needed a big brain, with an even bigger computer, adept at a field of study both confusing and compelling: geospatial analytics. For the layman, that’s mapmaking. But maps aren’t what they used to be, nor is making them. The nearly infinite amounts of data available requires a fairly intentional direction from the outset. We had a little homework to do.
We were lucky to bring on our friend Lisa Shealy and her company Peace of Land. Fortunately for us, she was a gracious guide to these ambitious yet naive adventurers. Lisa was a quick study on our project’s premise and went to work researching, archiving and digitizing old maps for use as building blocks. She then configured runs by neighborhood, giving us a schedule based on what we thought we could manage given our availability and competing agendas (families, responsibilities, jobs, you know, life). Here’s a peek at our proposed approach, subject to change given, well, life…
Tentative routes and order (miles are approximate, plus we’ll average 2-3 miles of extra to knock out all the dead ends and double backs):
South Of Broad (1) = 10.5 miles
French Quarter (2) + Ansonborough (3) = 10.6 miles
Harleston Village (4) = 12.2 miles
Mayzck-Wraggborough (5) + King Street (6) = 12.6 miles
Radcliffeborough (7) + Cannonborough + Elliotsborough (8) = 10.5 miles
East Side (9) = 11.7 miles
West Side (10) = 9.4 miles
West Edge-MUSC (11) = 7.9 miles
Hampton Park Terrace (12) = 7 miles
Upper East Side (13) = 8 miles
North Central (14) = 10 miles
Wagener Terrace (15) = 11 miles
There are some truly fascinating aspects to each leg of the run that quickly became apparent upon the initial mapping exercise. We will share more as we get underway, and hopefully tie things together as we near conclusion. It goes without saying that we’re likely to discover one or two things along the way that no map yet shows, because that’s how the story goes. We will bring Lisa back in on the back end to makes sense of what we stumble upon, and see what a post-run mapping collab might look like. Stay tuned….
