Normally innocuous (like: renaming or bending a road), you think of them as equivalent to programmer’s Easter Egg or a hidden watermark on a photograph – a buried surprise in everyday maps.īut what are the implications of doing this on a smaller scale of pedestrian circulation, deceiving people not by square mile, but by cubic feet? Could you frustrate the janitorial staff at a school, scare someone into imagining a secret room in their apartment complex? Would it trick urban explorers into actually physically trapping themselves? We will set these open questions aside and leave you with a little fun fact: while designed to catch copiers, trap streets cannot themselves be copyright. Unlike some paper streets (example shown above), which are planned but never become a reality, trap streets and phantom settlements (like Argleton, a faux town depicted below) are fictitious creations from the start, designed to mislead copyists into revealing their own copyright infringement. “Nothing sinister-you don’t want people fleeing toward an emergency stairway that doesn’t exist in the event of a real-life fire-but why not an innocent janitorial closet somewhere or a freight elevator that no one could ever access in the first place? Why not a mysterious door to nowhere, or a small room that somehow appears to be within the very room you’re standing in?” Now imagine the same thing applied to indoor spaces being mapped by new mobile device apps: trap rooms, halls, closets and stairwells – entirely fake spaces that could at worst confuse, but at best might become targets of offbeat geo-locational games.īldgBlog (image above by Laura Pedrick for The New York Times) speculates about introducing false information to interior maps of places like shopping malls: And the practice is not limited to towns or roads – there are trap ponds, trap parks, trap buildings and trap sidewalks, too. As is the continuing existence of Agloe, a place that still is, because it never was.Phantom settlements and trap streets are faked or falsified, intentionally introduced (or materially altered) by map makers to catch those who would copy them. That the song failed to include any actual examples of irony is in itself ironic. A trap street is a fictitious street included on a map, often outside the area the map. “Isn’t it ironic? Like rain on your wedding day,” sang Alanis Morissette in Ironic. cartography cool copright copyright copyrights map map.trap mapping maps openstreetmap streets trap trapstreets trapstreet urban via:tomc watermark. This, its strange history and the popularity of the book Paper Towns ensures a steady stream of curious sightseers. It was, however, sufficient proof that Agloe existed.
![trap street cartography trap street cartography](https://hebstreits.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Printable-street-map-of-Escondido-California-185965.jpg)
A lack of houses or indeed a town of any kind should have suggested otherwise the unfortunate shopkeeper went out of business shortly after. Its store manager, having spotted Agloe on a map, had taken it as a good place to set up shop. The term paper street and trap street are often confused, but they can be interpreted as different things: Paper towns/street can be planned constructions that are never created, trap streets are included to trap other cartographers.
![trap street cartography trap street cartography](https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/47/cabinet_047_bridle_james_004.jpg)
McNally pointed out that it would lose the case: Agloe’s general store could be found at the intersection. When it appeared years later on a map made by one of their competitors, Rand McNally, General Drafting threatened to sue. Commissioned to make a map of New York state in the 1930s, they used the initials of their names to create a paper town – Agloe – which they dropped into a dirt road intersection in the Catskills. And the practice is not limited to towns or roads there are trap ponds, trap parks, trap buildings and trap sidewalks, too.
![trap street cartography trap street cartography](https://360.here.com/hs-fs/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/superior.png)
Phantom settlements and trap streets are faked or falsified, intentionally introduced (or materially altered) by map makers to catch those who would copy them. Trap Streets Street, Fantasy World Map, Cartography, Map Art, Fantasy City Map. The trail leads to somewhere and nowhere – Agloe.Īgloe was the creation of two men: Otto Lindberg and Ernest Alpens from America’s General Drafting Company. Trap Streets & Rooms: Cartographic Errors Catch Copycats. In cartography, a trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of 'trapping' potential copyright violators of the map who, if caught, would be unable to explain the inclusion of the 'trap street' on their map as innocent. When its protagonist Margo disappears, she leaves oblique clues as to her whereabouts. Perhaps the most notable cartographic curiosity is Agloe, immortalised in John Green’s 2008 novel, Paper Towns.