Ilyse Iris Magy wants you to take a closer look at your city. The local artist is working on a rad new project, Lines Made By Walking, which launches this Friday at StoreFrontLab (337 Shotwell Street). If you’re a map enthusiast, owner of any guidebooks on secret stairway walks, and/or just someone who wants to rekindle your love for this majestic-but-conflicted city, this experiment is for you.

Here’s what Ilyse has to say about Lines:

For five weekends, I will be leading walks from StoreFrontLab to locations around the perimeter of the city, going counterclockwise from North to Northeast. On each walk, we will collectively track points and moments of interest, marking them on the sidewalk with chalk and recording field notes. Throughout the month, we will transcribe these encounters in the same chalk by marking their precise locations on a map projected directly on the wall in the gallery. When the projector is off, this installation will be a scaled representation of the 7×7 mile drawing our marks make throughout the city.

Here’s what the schedule looks like:

Friday 9/19, 6-8:30PM: Opening Reception
Saturday 9/20: Walk 1: North
Saturday 9/27: Walk 2: Northwest
Sunday 10/5: Walk 3: Southwest
Wednesday 10/8, 6:30PM: Maptime SF (Open hand-drawn mapmaking night)
Sunday 10/12: Walk 4: Southeast
Saturday 10/18: Walk 5: Northeast
Sunday 10/19, 6-8PM: Completion Closing Celebration

(All walks depart from StoreFrontLab at 12PM.)

Lines Made By Walking kicks off StoreFrontLab’s 2014/15 season, City Making, a nine-month series of installations, wanderings, happenings, and conversations that look critically and optimistically at San Francisco’s future.

Register for a spot on Eventbrite, and invite your friends!

Even though the SF bike coalition has put a ton of painstaking work into creating a thoroughly-detailed bicycle map of the city, it can appear pretty daunting to anyone glancing at it while trying to plan a riding route, and just plain overwhelming to newbie riders looking to adopt cycling as their primary means of transportation.  Fortunately, longtime cyclist Mat Kladney noticed this and decided to create a map that makes bicycling from one end of the city to the other look as simple as following a straight line:

“Need to get from Downtown to the Bernal Heights? Just follow the Blue Line,” he says. “This simplicity will re-frame the existing San Francisco bicycle lanes as the San Francisco Bicycle System and will help convince more people to saddle up and take to the streets.”

Instead of contoured lines denoting hill grade or the inclusion of every single city street, the map ends up looking like a subway system map, with popular routes like Valencia’s “Green Wave” called out.  So, the next time you’re trying to figure out the perfect route to that bike picnic at Baker Beach, just pick a color or two a ride!

[Link to map, via The Atlantic]

C’mon Pony is responsible for a lot of wonderful things. But there’s just something about this map.

More great stuff by C’mon Pony…..

We love rad maps of San Francisco, and here’s one I haven’t seen before: “Secret Histories Map of San Francisco“. It’s so rad, in fact, that we will excuse the unfortunate misspelling ”Delores Park”.

A note from the artist Deth P. Sun, who debuted this piece in 2009:

Marci and I and a bunch of other friends were asked by the San Francisco Arts Commission to make work around the theme of “Trace Elements”. The idea around “Trace Elements” or what I took from it was how people don’t know about the history of things that they might pass by on the street, or how things got to where they were at and how things might have been forgotten (yeah, like Frodo and the Ring, only not). So I thought I’d make a Secret Map of San Francisco.

On the site, there are a lot of close-ups and more detailed information, some which you might know (Golden fire hydrant!) and some that you might not (the fortune cookie was invented here!). Give yourself an hour to take it in this afternoon.

I guess this begs the question: where can we score a print?

[DethPSun via Emily Heller]

Three great beasts. Here’s the proof:

(Bigger version)

The original photo:

Or maybe they’re all just reaching out to gobble up the doggie biscuits that are Islands Yerba Buena, Treasure, Angel and Alcatraz.

Of course, this is not without precedent, in that I had previously revealed the East Bay Beast.

[Originally via SFist]

Local design and technology studio Stamen is probably best known for all of the cool interactive maps they make, like Prettymaps and Crimespotting. They’ve just released a beautiful watercolor basemap to be used with OpenStreetMap data. It’s a great day to be a map nerd.

While not as mesmerizingly beautiful as the last map we featured here, this cartographic offering more than makes up for it with controversy.  Available in a variety of colors here.

(Thanks Tony!)

Our pal Jen just finished up this mesmerizing ink on paper depiction of San Francisco that I simply cannot stop staring at! Every block in the city is represented by a different color, separated by every street.  I think my block is lime green.  This may well be the raddest map of the city ever.

See it bigger right here, and be sure to check out the rest of Jen’s amazing stuff here!

Back in May, Burrito Justice imagined a world where we’d be docking our canoes on the shores of a Dolores Park Island Oasis on sunny weekends. Boy, I’d hate to be downstream from the river west of Dolores Park. The water probably runs yellow, if you catch my drift.

This  amazing SF islands map is now a poster for sale on Zazzle in three different sizes. He says you can get it in time to deliver to your San Francisco-loving friends for Christmas. It’s way better than socks!

23″ x 23″ for $25, 15″ x 15″ for $16. 11″ x 11″ for $11.

Also, here’s some visual aid, courtesy of Johnny0 (note that the treacherous conditions have had little effect on the brunch line at Boogaloos):

Ever wonder what SF would look like rendered as an 8-bit video game map? No? Well, clearly some other nerd has. Check it out in it’s 24-color glory at 8-Bit Cities.

I hear that forest patch on the SE corner is a good place to level up.

I stumbled upon this custom radial map of some guy’s favorite burrito joints and their relative distances from his home. From the looks of it, it’s a map of Santa Clara:

Her son Greg, then 29, had recently introduced her to the “My Maps” plotting feature on Google maps. “He suggested that it would [even] allow me to map his favorite burrito joints, and I took him at his word,” says Brown. “I had radial maps in my head; they seem the most primal, symbolic kind of map. And yet–here’s the beauty and elasticity of maps–perfect for burrito joints!” Wondering about those Korean characters at the bottom? They’re a nod to Greg’s wife, who is Korean. The translation: “I love burritos.”

This looks like something we’d see on Burrito Justice; I’m surprised Johnny0 wasn’t consulted. Although in the Mission we’d definitely have to use feet instead of miles.

(via National Geographic)

Laughing Squid and Telstar Logistics recently exposed us to the historical imagery feature in Google Earth.  San Francisco’s 1946 layer proved irresistible, especially concerning the old SF Seals baseball stadium, now home to the Potrero Safeway and Office Depot.

As is inevitable amongst map wonks, the Telstar Logistics and Burrito Justice mapping teams started to wonder exactly where in the stores the bases were located. The alignment of the 1947 photomap is a little wobbly in Google Earth (it’s off by 30-100 feet) so we turned to another favored source for greater precision, Sanborn maps overlaid in GE. Behold the diamond of history.

In the world’s first blogging simulcast, you can see the raw base photos of the Telstar Logistics Surveying Unit along with painfully detailed overlay maps by the Burrito Justice Research Department. Telstar Logistics historical analysis will be available on Laughing Squid posthaste.

For some perspective (because that’s how we roll) here’s opening day for the Giants in 1959, their first game against LA. That’s 16th on the top and Bryant on the right.

Note that history was made recording history: a blogger ACTUALLY LEFT HIS HOME and went on-site to determine that home plate and 1st are located in Office Depot, while 2nd and 3rd base in Safeway.

Below, blue tape marks third base, looking towards home plate.  (Torillas in front of you, and frozen pizzas behind you, as is so often the case when you’re trying to steal home.)

To make this post even more relevant to the Mission — Seals Stadium was also home to the Mission Reds (aka the Missions) before they moved down to Hollywood in 1938.

And prior to Seal Stadium’s construction in 1930, both teams played at 14th and Valencia at Recreation Park. Think of that next time you’re at Four Barrel.

More photos and maps at TL, LS, and BJ.

Over at, Lola examines why the web-based tend to tobogan acuatico hinchable skimp on reliable homicide-related info:

The crime map allows you to search for forcible rape, arson, vehicle theft, robbery, burglary, vandalism, aggravated assault, larceny, and drug offenses. But not homicide.

Link to further investigation and conclusions.