Boston in 50 Maps, with Andy Woodruff (episode 358)

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Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Boston Maps with Andy Woodruff

Jake:
[0:13] This is episode 358, Boston and 50 Maps, with Andy Woodruff. Hi, I’m Jake. In just a few minutes, I’m going to be joined by cartographer Andy Woodruff, author of the new book, Boston and 50 Maps. Going beyond familiar compilations of public domain historic maps of Boston, Woodruff’s work offers an engaging, data-driven look at the hub through 50 original, modern maps. Andy’s maps reveal layers of Boston’s history, changing demographics, and even hyper-local culture. From the myth of streets laid out by 17th century cows to the city’s long-lost territories. In this conversation, we explore fascinating corners of Boston’s past and present, including what triple-deckers and houses of pizza can tell us about historical immigration patterns, why residents can’t seem to agree on the boundaries of their own neighborhoods, which areas had better transit access a century ago, and exactly how saturated we are in Dunkin’ Donuts franchises. Together we explore how data-driven cartography offers a whole new lens on local history, revealing the stories that both historic maps and traditional pros often miss.

Jake:
[1:33] But before we talk to Andy Woodruff about maps in Boston, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to all the listeners whose financial support makes it possible for me to keep making Hub History.

Jake:
[1:46] Making an audio podcast doesn’t take as much overhead as producing professional video, but it’s not free. We have expenses like website hosting and security, podcast media hosting, a few AI tools now, although not to write the episodes, newspaper archives, and, of course, transcription fees. I’ve also been experimenting with editing some of our content with a modern digital audio workstation that lets me edit audio by editing the transcript like a document. I still use a traditional digital audio workstation called Audacity, which has the benefit of being free to edit my solo episodes. But this new tool has proven useful for interviews. It allows me to quickly scan through the transcript for diversions and extraneous chatter and instantly cut them out. We have a handful of Patreon supporters who give $10 or $20 a month to cover expenses, but there are many more who have been giving $2 or $5 a month, some of them for years. And that support adds up.

Jake:
[2:52] Listener support has kept this podcast on the air for almost a decade now, and I couldn’t do it without you. To everybody who’s already supporting the show, especially all those $2 sponsors who’ve stuck with me for a long time, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors. I’m joined now by Andy Woodruff. Andy is a freelance cartographer whose work includes everything from hiking trail maps to data visualizations. He moved to the Boston area in 2008 and learned about his adopted city by mapping it. Soon, he became known as the consummate Boston Maps nerd, including contributing to the Bostonography blog, creating maps for Boston Globe ideas, and serving as the inaugural designer-in-residence with the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.

Jake:
[3:58] Andy Woodruff, welcome to the show. Andy Woodruff, welcome to the show. I’m having you on today to talk about your new book, new in May of 2026, Boston in 50 Maps. And I have to tell you, it was not the book I thought I was going to get in the mail. I’ve read books like Mapping Boston. I’ve interviewed people about books like The Atlas of Boston History. And that’s not the book that I got in the mail from your publishers. Tell me a little bit about what the idea behind Boston in 50 maps was.

Andy Woodruff:
[4:30] Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me here to talk about this. It’s a book of new original maps made in the present day by me, instead of a book of historical maps covering the history of Boston. So, it’s a kind of eclectic set of maps about a variety of topics about the local area from some historical subjects to some modern day demographics to just some cultural icons and curiosities, boston and 50 maps is part of a series of books from the belt publishing, of various cities in 50 maps the belt and belt publishing refers to the rust belt so this original series was some cities uh cleveland buffalo uh, detroit uh pittsburgh but they’ve expanded this outside to the whole country and And Boston is the first of those in this series.

Jake:
[5:21] Like you intuited, I was expecting to open up a book full of public domain historical maps and found a book of 50 original maps of different concepts and stories around Boston, which I’m.

Jake:
[5:36] Having a lot of fun thumbing through. I’m going to try to be disciplined in this interview and not ask you about every single page of the book, but I easily could. I’m the sort of nerd who can spend all day on the Leventhal Map Center’s website just browsing. But I realized when the publisher reached out to me, I had this inkling in the back of my mind. I said, Andy Woodruff, that’s a name that sounds familiar for some reason.

Jake:
[5:57] And I eventually realized it’s because I’ve encountered your work before years ago. I guess the first map we can talk about from your book is a version of the first map I ever encountered of yours, which is the neighborhood consensus map, which I’ll take a slight crack at describing and then we can talk about. So I have the book in my hand. And it’s a map of the city of Boston. So Boston itself, I almost said Boston proper. That’s another topic we can talk about maybe. So Brookline’s not on here. Newton’s not on here. Dedham’s not on here. So it’s the boundaries of the city and some neighboring areas of Cambridge and Somerville with a few color overlays. So there are orange boundaries that are labeled as the official neighborhood boundaries within Boston. And then there are, yellow lines drawn that say they’re derived from a survey and then a color gradient from light blue to dark blue sort of centered on each of those outlined areas. Can you tell me a little bit about what this map represents and how it came to be?

Neighborhood Boundaries

Andy Woodruff:
[6:58] The map represents the results of an online survey that I had put up almost 10 years ago at this point, which asked people to, on a map, draw their neighborhood, whatever it may be they draw a shape give it a name, and submit that and then I collected all those responses, and kind of aggregated how much do people agree that a certain area is part of a certain neighborhood, and the color gradient on the map represents kind of that consensus the darker the color the more people agreed that that was part of the neighborhood and around many of the neighborhoods you’ll see this lighter fringe where people are not quite so sure where the neighborhood ends and the next one begins. And this is a project that was part of the Bostonography blog that I used to, well, I will say we still run it. It’s pretty dormant. My friend, Tim Wallace, who is a cartographer and or geographer with the New York Times and from Massachusetts, he and I ran this blog. And this was kind of my way of learning about the city. I had moved here to the area not that long before and would go out and walk around and look at things and then think of things that would be interesting to show on a map and then just say, why not? We’ll make a blog of it. People were blogging in those days more. We got a little bit of a map nerd following locally. But we came up with this neighborhood thing. I think just because so many news articles would come out saying that such and such event happened in…

Andy Woodruff:
[8:21] The Fenway, for example. And then people reply to that and say, that’s not the Fenway, that’s Roxbury, that’s whatever. And people would argue about it online. And I think even in the newsrooms, the journalists are like, not sure which neighborhood to put and they have to debate amongst themselves. And I thought, you know, there’s so many different ways that the city defines neighborhoods. There’s kind of an official, typical boundary set, but each of the city agencies has their own way of defining neighborhoods. And there’s not like really one way to do it so we thought the best way to get at it is just ask people what do you think on the ground so we came up with this survey and got a bunch of replies and, one of those maps uh was yeah this is essentially the same map that we published uh years ago but with some new overlays.

Jake:
[9:06] There must have been several versions back in the day because I responded to your survey, but I had seen a version of the map before that. So, I think there must have been some publication and revision, something like that. But I like the fact that my input is in here somewhere on this map.

Andy Woodruff:
[9:20] There were two versions of this. The first one, Boston officially has, what is it, 20, 21 neighborhoods, I think. The first version, you had to select, I want to now draw Jamaica Plain and then show me what Jamaica Plain is and so on. And then we did a new version where there was no prompting. It was just draw a neighbor and you could draw it, you know, way out in LA if you wanted to. It was just really open-ended. You could draw any neighborhood you want. And that’s why the new version also includes Cambridge, Somerville. There’s some pockets of Brookline are on here. They’re not labeled on my map, but Coolidge Corner and so on. So, we thought people don’t necessarily even identify by Dorchester, for example. They might identify more in one of the sub-neighborhoods of that. And that is captured in the data. It’s not what was shown on the map, but, you know, some of those little smaller neighborhoods are in there, which was really interesting to see.

Jake:
[10:09] One thing I noticed looking at the map is that there’s less of the light color, the areas that are sort of not disputed, but there’s not as much consensus around where those lines should fall there. And the lines are pretty crisp for neighborhoods that resulted from an annexation, where you could look back at a historic map and say, okay, well, Hyde Park, here were the boundaries of the town of Hyde Park that’s now part of the city of Boston. Whereas, like, Jamaica Plain and Roslindale, that’s pretty fuzzy between those two, because there’s not a historic line to draw. I thought that was neat.

Andy Woodruff:
[10:42] Yeah, that is interesting to see where that’s true and where it’s not. I mean, the one I always look at is Roxbury, Dorchester, and, you know, those were separate towns, right, that had a real boundary, but it’s been a bit fuzzified now that they’re both part of Boston.

Jake:
[10:54] And I notice a big fuzzy area over Franklin Park where Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, Dorchester, nobody’s quite sure, okay, who does Franklin Park belong to?

Andy Woodruff:
[11:02] Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, the other curious one is South End and Roxbury Mass Ave is –, typically the boundary, but that section just below Mass Ave has become a little bit rebranded and some people think of it as the South End. So, that part got a little fuzzy too.

Four Sections of Boston

Jake:
[11:21] The Neighborhood Consensus map is sort of smack dab in the middle of your book, but can you tell the listener a little bit or hopefully your future reader a little bit about how the book is laid out? It’s split up into four sections. What are the overarching themes or sections to the book?

Andy Woodruff:
[11:38] Sure. Yeah. So, one of them, the first one is kind of historical topics. I think I called it the making of Boston or something. It’s a struggle not to get bogged down here because Boston, of course, has a long history and you can fill multiple books of just the history of Boston and maps. So, that kind of starts at the beginning from the old shoreline and then goes through history even up to kind of modern history like the busing crisis of the 70s, for example. And then there’s another section. I called it the lay of the land. It’s both kind of the physical layout of Boston, the terrain, the water, as well as some of the cultural organizations and maybe architecture of Boston. A third one is about transportation, how you get around, how the city streets are laid out, transit, walking, storrowing, things like that. The last one is kind of just cultural and demographic topics. So there’s place of birth, age of population, but also this is where some of the more just kind of fun celebrations of Boston come in. The more curious topics, I think a lot of them are in this last one.

Jake:
[12:50] I’ve picked out a smattering of maps from across all four sections that I’d like to chat about a little bit. I promise I’m going to be disciplined and not make you talk about every single page. We’ll leave something for the reader to find on their own. But before I do that, what does a reader gain from a book like – would you call this a cartographic book like this that they wouldn’t learn from reading, a traditional history of Boston or what I expected to get, which was sort of those historical public domain maps of Boston? What’s different about this for the reader?

Andy Woodruff:
[13:21] A map can say a lot that words can’t. I mean, words can say it, but it takes a lot of words to say what a map can show you in a few moments. So, you can write tons about the history of the things behind most of these maps, but the map really just synthesizes it into a pretty quick, concise way of interpreting the gist of the story, at least. And instead of just looking through historic maps and talking about them, if we have a new map of either modern-day Boston or a historical topic, you have the benefit of adding some interpretation and context to it that the original map doesn’t include because the map itself was just made at the time. And now we can look back on it and say, well, what does this mean for modern-day Boston? Or how is that reflected in the current-day geography of Boston? Maps can present a lot of information easily.

Jake:
[14:14] Rather than a chart, I feel like a map is a great way to visualize data, too, when there is some, I guess, geographical overlay.

Andy Woodruff:
[14:20] People can often place themselves in a map. You can see what this means for your own life. If you live or work or travel through these areas and you see this kind of stuff every day, then now you have a context for it.

Jake:
[14:32] And you’ll hear me make those references to where I find myself on these maps throughout the conversation, I think. So digging right in with some of how Boston was made in this first section, I’m not going to make the listener rehash some of the past episodes. We can go back into the back catalog. Maybe I’ll put in the show notes links to some of our shows that we’ve done about the historical annexations where Boston annexed neighboring towns to grow or where we made land, expanded the wharves into filled in areas, the Back Bay, all that good stuff. That’s how Boston grows.

Boston’s Shrinking Borders

Jake:
[15:08] There’s a map in the book called Boston’s Lost Territory, which is really something I hadn’t thought as much about as how Boston grows, as how Boston has shrunk a few times over the years. What do we see here?

Andy Woodruff:
[15:20] This was really interesting for me to learn. I had not known this. I think I came across this topic when I was trying to look up annexations. And so, I found some resources. The big one ended up being your podcast, which really detailed all the history of annexation.

Jake:
[15:35] The listener can’t see this, but I’m patting myself on the back a little bit here.

Andy Woodruff:
[15:38] Yeah, that was the best description I could find of the history. But I came across these sources, of course, that the Leventhal Map Center has links to various sources about the boundaries and history of boundaries of Boston. And one of them refers to, this is a, in the front of it, it describes this, really quick overview history of Boston. And when Boston was first founded by its settler colonists, it, you know, famously was on this tiny Shawmut Peninsula, practically an island, not that much land for the people who at the time were more or less like rural people, I guess. And so, immediately what they wanted was more space. And there are all these outlying areas that were granted to the town of Boston that are now part of Quincy, Revere, Chelsea, Brookline. This book makes a reference to all the places that… That apparently were once part of Boston. And then over time, those were split off into separate towns. And that really is the story of a lot of towns in the area. You know, Charlestown used to be much bigger and Somerville was part of Charlestown and a bunch of the suburbs used to be part of Cambridge. And the same thing, I guess, happened with Boston just kind of a long time ago. This was in the 1640s, I think, maybe was the height of its external land. It was estimated that the town of Boston at that time had under its jurisdiction a larger area than it presently does.

Jake:
[17:08] Even after the annexations at that point?

Andy Woodruff:
[17:09] Yeah, even after the annexations. I think this was written after the Hyde Park annexation, so it’s basically Boston today.

Jake:
[17:19] I’m a Hyde Park resident. I think we were 1912, so we’re the most recent annexation. I was surprised to see the divestitures, I guess you’d call it, go north, they go south, and they go west. that east is the harbor, not too much to lose out there. But sections of Revere and Chelsea and Winthrop were labeled as having been formerly Boston. It’s really amazing.

Andy Woodruff:
[17:40] I didn’t consider that. I know. It’s really interesting. I’m curious and I don’t know if there is a case where there’s a piece of land that was part of Boston and then was not and then got re-annexed.

Jake:
[17:52] Ooh, that’d be a fun project to take on. I feel like now maybe I know what rabbit hole I’m going to go down next weekend.

Boston’s Famous Firsts

Jake:
[18:00] So sticking in that first section about the making of Boston, there’s a section about Boston first, first in the nation. And that’s a topic I come to for the podcast pretty often. Boston has a lot of – it’s an innovation hub today. It has been for near 400 years now. So we have a lot of firsts to point to. So I’m curious what sort of firsts made it into the book and sort of how you picked and chose what those firsts were.

Andy Woodruff:
[18:26] Yeah you know i don’t quite remember why i chose what i did so there’s things on my map that are some of the famous you know harvard being like the first university the first raising of the american flag the most modern one is the first and this was, the asterisk is first legally recognized same-sex marriage because there was, an attempt at that i think in san francisco maybe or somewhere else beforehand that was like overturned or something but you know the first like definitely legal same-sex marriage license was issued in Cambridge in 2004. I think one that I wanted to make sure to include is the first aerial photo because I’m a map nerd. So aerial photographs from up above are important to me. And the very first one was from a balloon over the Boston Common in 1860.

Jake:
[19:13] I have a soft spot for both maps and historical aviation. So the balloon-based aerial photos really – I enjoy them from all angles. And that’s another one I will find our past episode and put a link in the show notes this week. Because I have a past episode all about balloon ascents in Boston. And the one in 1860 for the first balloon ascent is in there. And I found an error in a lot of the documentation of that. It puts it on the wrong date in 1860. So, I’ll put that link to that show in the show notes this week.

Andy Woodruff:
[19:46] The first I had not heard about was the supposed first reported UFO in Boston. This is like John Winthrop himself recorded the anecdote from some guys on the Muddy River.

Jake:
[19:57] I have to wonder, after the past couple of years, we’ve had so much more Aurora. The Northern Lights have been so much more active over the past couple of years. I had never really, as an adult, seen… I’d seen the Northern Lights one time as a little kid, don’t really remember it. Now, having seen it and how the lights move around the sky… I have to wonder if that’s the phenomenon that John Winthrop was describing. Because, yeah, it was like two guys fishing from a rowboat near the mouth of the muddy river, like the Charles Gate today, basically. I don’t remember the details. We do have a past episode. I’ll link to it.

Andy Woodruff:
[20:26] It read like a classic modern UFO. Like, there was a light that was zipping around unnaturally, and the guys, like, suddenly woke up by Charlestown. Like, they didn’t know how they got there.

Jake:
[20:37] They, like, lost time in classic X-Files fashion, right?

Andy Woodruff:
[20:40] Yeah.

Jake:
[20:40] I forgot all about that aspect. That’s great. And this is – hold on, I’ve got to look at the map again. That was 1639. There was no concept of a flying saucer and nobody was being influenced by the sci-fi movie they watched last night. That’s really interesting.

Isle of Boston

Jake:
[20:55] So, this is one of those moments where I said I would talk about my relationship with some of the maps in the book, flipping forward a few pages to a map that’s labeled the Isle of Boston. Maybe you can describe what this map shows before I give my own personal connection to it.

Andy Woodruff:
[21:12] The map is depicted as an island and it includes most of the city of Boston as well as some Brookline and Newton and little bits of Dedham and Watertown. Dedham being kind of the important one because it’s the reason this is technically an island. You’ve got the harbor, of course, on one side. You’ve got the Charles River, which snakes around and comes, you know, goes west. Well, I guess this is going upstream, but traveling upstream west from downtown Boston, it kind of curves back down. Around Newton and down to like West Roxbury, And there is a connection between the Charles River and the Motherbrook. There is a canal that connects the Charles into the Motherbrook, which goes into the Neponset River and then therefore completes the circuit and you have an island of Boston. This is just like a fun bit of trivia about Boston. I don’t know where I when I learned it, but I’m sure your listeners know the story as I think you have a whole episode about this.

Jake:
[22:11] I do. I have to at some point stop saying we have a past episode about this. But this is a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because I live basically steps from the Motherbrook in Hyde Park, part of Hyde Park that used to be part of Dedham before all the annexations, blah, blah, blah. I moved into this home in –, 2009, maybe. And I had no, I had never heard of the Motherbrook, no awareness. I don’t, it’s one of those things that it’s locally interesting, but like hyper locally interesting. I don’t think a lot of people who live in Beacon Hill or the Fenway pay a lot of attention to the Motherbrook. But I had that moment of realization when I was getting to know my new neighborhood, when I realized this water was flowing out of the Charles and then eventually would be flowing into the Neponset, which I got by analyzing maps, of course. I was like, holy crap, Boston’s an island. And I have this fantasy of trying to circumnavigate Boston by kayak or something, but I haven’t ever made it come true.

Andy Woodruff:
[23:08] I think it’s a little bit ruined because part of it’s now in a culvert, I think, under a parking lot or something. But we still count it. I don’t know if you can kayak through there.

Jake:
[23:17] Maybe you can. I’ve scoped it out. It looks a little scary, but maybe.

Andy Woodruff:
[23:23] But uh and this i think this is like a really this is an example of why i really love maps as a kind of an entry point into a a topic because, this is something you know you’re just browsing around a map and you see wait a second these rivers are connected oh that’s that’s curious that’s interesting cool boston’s an island but then if you start, looking into it you find this whole 400-year history, including what is said to be the first industrial canal, in the country, it’s really fascinating that you dive into something on a map and you can really, Learn a lot just because you saw something that looked interesting on the map.

Jake:
[24:03] Yeah, I mean, the flip side of all that interesting history is I think – I also – I volunteer once a month with the Neponset River Watershed Association doing water sampling. And the data tells us that the Mother Brook is one of the most heavily polluted bodies of water anywhere in the area because it has an almost 400-year industrial history because it was that first industrial canal. But it’s funny how the presentation of a map can change how you think about a historical fact like that. Because in your presentation of the Isle of Boston, there’s an inset map, a little smaller square that shows maybe a more traditional view of how people would think about the rivers in the context of Boston. And it shows just a little strip of the mother brook. And it’s mostly landmass with these little blue lines representing the rivers. But then the main map, you just focus on the landmass that would be the so-called, island of Boston, the Isle of Boston, and you show it surrounded by water. So, you don’t show the surrounding landmass. It draws the eye. It really drives the point home that if there were a certain lens, Boston’s that island.

Andy Woodruff:
[25:10] And I guess that’s part of the job of a cartographer is to design a map in a way that sells the point of the map. So, it’s fun. You know, it’s obviously a little exaggerated. It’s not like you’re stepping off the shores of Boston if you cross this area.

Jake:
[25:24] No, but it sure is fun to think about it that way.

Andy Woodruff:
[25:26] Yeah.

Triple-Decker Territory

Jake:
[25:27] I also wanted to, speaking of personal experiences, I wanted to talk about your map showing where what I call triple-deckers – I understand that the three-decker, triple-decker terminology wars can heat up sometimes –, You have a map showing where the density of triple-deckers throughout Boston and the neighboring towns are. And I’ve lived in a few triple-deckers in my day. I live in a single-family home now. I feel very lucky to do so. But before this, it was all triple-deckers all the time in Boston, in Somerville, in Watertown, all of Mission Hill, different neighborhoods. I’m also a transplant to Boston, but I’ve been here a little longer. Maybe I came here in the late 90s. And it wasn’t until I had been here a really long time that I realized that these are kind of a local phenomenon.

Andy Woodruff:
[26:18] I can’t find this anymore. It’s on the Arch Boston Forum website. Somebody there, I’m pretty sure, posted something one time that I really love and it said, most of Boston doesn’t look like Boston. And I love that quote because what most people see of Boston, you know, the bajillions of tourists and so on is the old central city, the brick and stone Boston, the quaint and stately streets. But, you know, the real icon of Boston is the triple decker. And it’s just in the residential neighborhoods. What you see on the map that I have in the book is the city of Boston, as well as some surrounding ones where I could get the data, Brookline, Cambridge, Somerville, and Winthrop. And there’s just a colored dot for every triple decker that I could find in the tax assessor’s descriptions. The bulk of them are Dorchester through Mattapan, but they’re everywhere. There’s a bunch in Somerville and other Boston neighborhoods.

Jake:
[27:13] There’s almost a bullseye drawn over my old neighborhood in Mission Hill. There’s a hot spot there.

Andy Woodruff:
[27:19] Yeah, there’s a hot spot, right, of course.

Jake:
[27:21] So, what does that tell us? Why are triple-deckers such a phenomenon here? Why were they created?

Andy Woodruff:
[27:27] It was just the style of dense urban housing at a time when Boston was growing rapidly in both land and population, especially from immigration, I think, right? And I’m not an expert on this. I mean, I think – I don’t know if it was a deliberate choice to build this kind of housing as opposed to row houses that are connected to each other. Although, you know, we do have some of those too, but the triple-decker has air on all sides. And I don’t know if that was maybe seen as a more…

Jake:
[27:57] Yeah, I wonder if that’s a fire code thing or if it was closer to the white picket fence and the single-family home and the suburbs. Yeah, it’s interesting.

Andy Woodruff:
[28:05] I’m not certain about that history, and I’m sure there’s a book out there or something about this.

Jake:
[28:09] I’m sure somebody will email me after this airs to correct anything we just said.

Andy Woodruff:
[28:14] But it is certainly correlated with, you know, waves of immigration, I think. So, the patterns we see on the map, I imagine, kind of correspond to where the population was kind of exploding in the later 1800s, maybe early 1900s, in and around Boston. But the funny thing, you know, is this is the iconic style of Boston, and then they essentially became illegal at some point, you know, ostensibly because of fire risk, I think, but it seems there was some anti-immigration sentiment, anti-immigrant sentiment behind it because these are associated with immigrants and Irish people or whatever. And then the powers that be that made them undesirable as a style of building.

Jake:
[28:57] Yeah. Between being more tightly regulated and being associated with undesirable populations, the triple decker dropped off to such a degree that it was newsworthy, this year in June when a new triple decker won whatever approvals it needed a new triple decker was going to get constructed in, uh and it made like universal hub and some of the the local blogs uh and of course being built in dorchester.

Andy Woodruff:
[29:26] You know i think somerville recently re-legalized them as well you know with, obviously um you know newer requirements around uh fire safety and things like that i’m sure but yeah it’s it’s crazy that like a neighborhood full of these buildings. It is newsworthy when a new one is built. And I often hear this about a lot of types of urban housing in the dense cities that most of the housing that exists in these cities would be illegal to build today. And I think that’s true in a lot of places, not just here.

Jake:
[29:56] And I will say the cautionary tale for that was also a very recent podcast episode. This May, May 2026, and people can go find the episode. I did a story about the Bellflower Street fire in Dorchester, where basically almost two full blocks of triple-deckers burned in the summer as the 1960s in the summer in an almost uncontrollable firestorm. The pictures are almost unbelievable of the intensity of this fire.

Busting the Cow Path Myth

Jake:
[30:23] So you start the book with a couple of quotes. I’m flipping back if I’m off mic because I’m flipping through pages. One from David Ortiz. This is our effing city and nobody’s going to dictate our freedom. Very famous quote. Another quote that’s often invoked around Boston shares the page with that. From Ralph Waldo Emerson. We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors. And this is one of the myths about Boston. I love a good myth about Boston. I don’t like when something that’s clearly a joke or a myth becomes taken seriously, which I feel like I hear this now repeated as a fact that Boston streets follow old cow paths. And that’s why we don’t have a nice grid like New York. I’ve seen a blog post that shows a picture of Boston’s meandering streets versus New York’s grid and say, New York, we want you to find where you’re going. Boston, because F you, we hate you. Can we talk a little bit about the reality that we find on your book in the map titled cow paths.

Andy Woodruff:
[31:26] The cow path thing has been around forever it seems like i mean the the source that i drew some of the some of this from was written at least 100 years ago and she refers to like, people’s grandparents at that time repeating the myths. So, you know, it’s been with us for a long time.

Jake:
[31:43] Yeah, I don’t think Emerson came up with the concept. I think he was just repeating what he had heard. Yeah.

Andy Woodruff:
[31:48] You’re right. People maybe believe it. This map here, this was maybe the last map that I inserted into this book because it was kind of a revelation after staring at maps for so long and even staring at maps over the years of Boston and making them. The weird pattern of streets was starting to just make sense to me. Like, I get it now and I’m going to make a map that tries to explain why these streets are the way they are, especially downtown, and maybe bust that cow paths myth. Really, what I think is that, you know, people are not that different from cows, I guess. We make a path where we need to go and then eventually we may pave over that. So, what this map shows is it highlights the original shoreline a little bit and then highlights streets that kind of flow their way towards the old longtime center of the city, which is called Dock Square, which now is nowhere near the water. Well, it’s not that near the water anyway. It’s kind of by Faneuil Hall. But that is where originally the town docks were, because that was in a cove. It was described in this book. It’s called like the Crooked and Narrow Streets of Boston or something. I can’t remember her name now.

Jake:
[32:51] Yeah, I can’t either, but I know who you mean now.

Andy Woodruff:
[32:54] She’s one of maybe a few amateur historians of the time who dug through all these records of early Boston and drew some maps of it and things like that. But she described it in a way that I liked it was just people settled where they needed to settle when they arrived coming over from Charlestown because they had no clean water and everything. If they were engaged in say a fishing life, they settled near the water. If they were grazing cattle, they were maybe farther from the water, things like that. But the docks were where the docks had to be in the cove where it made sense and that was the center of town. The civic buildings, the church were going to be built near there and the market. And then the streets kind of went from people’s houses to there or between people’s houses, perhaps. So, if you stare at the map of downtown Boston, you’ll see all these streets that seem to converge on that area or at least point toward it. And then a series of other streets that kind of are the circumference, not the spokes. I guess the ones that flow are the spokes, but the wheel. I don’t know. There’s streets that kind of encircle that dock area. And that is like the overall layout of that downtown area. That’s why it is how it is. And it also respected the shoreline and some hills at the time.

Jake:
[34:07] Your map sort of layers in where the hills are and in some cases were because not all the hills still remain because of landfill. And you show how the paths that lead otherwise directly toward Dock Square meander around the hills because nobody wants to walk up and over Beacon Hill, especially when it was 60 feet higher back in the day than it is now. Yeah, no cows involved. There were cows grazing everywhere, but not making these paths that become roads, I guess.

Andy Woodruff:
[34:33] Yeah, so I think downtown Boston is maybe just a bunch of desire paths between where people built their house and where they needed to go. It was not…, pre-planned, like some other towns were at the time, like Philadelphia.

Jake:
[34:46] While you were explaining that, I did a quick Google. It’s Annie Haven Thwing that we were both trying to think of. The crooked and narrow streets of the town of Boston, Annie Haven Thwing. Honestly, your description of how you sort of re-envisioned Boston after spending so much time immersed in these maps and having that natural evolution of the streets makes sense. Also reminding me of a book called The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch, which I may have used on the podcast before, but it’s a good one if anybody wants to go look it up. It’s not about Boston. It’s about urban planning and sort of how cities evolve, but there’s a lot of Boston uses as examples in the book.

Andy Woodruff:
[35:22] Right. Because I think he was at MIT.

Jake:
[35:23] I think so, yeah.

Andy Woodruff:
[35:24] So, most of the maps are Boston. Yeah, that’s always been fascinating to look at.

Boston’s Squares

Jake:
[35:29] While we’re talking sort of classic Boston themes, I’m just going to flip the page from CalPaths to the very next page, which is labeled Squares. And this is a different sort of map. And I’ll try to describe it a little bit for the listener, and then you can correct me or elaborate if you want. So this map isn’t an overview map of Boston or the region or a specific neighborhood. It almost strikes me as like the old paper silhouettes that people would have made. It’s a very two-tone, dark-on-light background. It’s a series of maybe 30, 40… Squares. Boston’s full of squares. You go to Mattapan Square, you go to Fields Corner, you go to City Square in Charlestown, you go in my neighborhood, I go to the Walscott Square to get on the bus. None of our squares, very few of our squares are actually square. And you’ve done a great job sort of illustrating this here. Talk to me a little bit about the squares of Boston.

Andy Woodruff:
[36:28] Yeah. And the map is showing just the kind of shape of the pavement through each of these squares the streets, you know new england has taken the idea of a city square or town square which is not a new thing, and they’ve they’ve kept the part where it’s like a commercial center but they’ve not kept the part where it’s like a square or any kind of plaza for that matter, these are squares in the sense that they’re like commercial centers where people come together, and a lot of them are old village centers or old town centers and roads would converge there coming from all the other nearby villages. So, they come from all over the place and they just kind of meet in these crazy, orientations. So, we’re not unique in the country to have business districts that grew up around, kind of converging roads like that, but we are more likely for them to be these crazy eight-way intersections. And for whatever reason, we are more likely to call them a square still.

Jake:
[37:27] Glancing over the squares on the map, really Monument Square in Charlestown is kind of the only one that’s actually square. Andrew Square, the first one on the map, is more of an asterisk than anything else. So, it’s really interesting how Copley Square is kind of rectangular. There are some shapes, but not a whole lot.

Andy Woodruff:
[37:46] Yeah. And then, you know, I don’t know, Monument Square in Charlestown. I don’t know if that’s really a square people even talk about as being a square. It’s just in the way that they do it with others.

Jake:
[37:56] It is different from like an Andrew Square or a Hyde Square. That is a business district. People converge there. You go to shop. You go to eat. Nobody goes to shop and eat at Monument Square.

Andy Woodruff:
[38:04] It’s just where the monument is.

Jake:
[38:05] It’s funny.

Andy Woodruff:
[38:06] I think I had to include it because it actually is a square.

Jake:
[38:09] Yeah, it’s a cool page. It’s cool to think about what we call a square because they are mostly not very square.

Lost Transit Lines

Jake:
[38:18] Now, I’m going to get into the section of your book about getting around. And there are so many topics in here that I want to do future episodes on that I feel like I could talk about forever about the unbuilt highways, the current reach of our transit system. Getting around is not just driving. Driving is considered. There’s lots of stuff about where cars go, but there’s also great maps for… The pedestrian to show neighborhoods that have more or less space devoted to cars versus people. There’s bike infrastructure. There’s lots of travel and transit in here. So, I’m just going to sample a couple of maps from this section, starting with our lost transit.

Andy Woodruff:
[39:03] And this is a topic where there are some pretty passionate people who know a lot about it. And I’m not really one of them, so I did my best. And, you know, as in a lot of American cities, you can start with streetcars. Every place used to have a ton of streetcars around, and that’s a lot of what’s on my map. It represents a point in time, maybe the 20s, close to the peak streetcar, but not that long before streetcars went away. So, there’s a lot of lines on the map that show where there used to be streetcars running around Boston and the suburbs.

Jake:
[39:32] And it’s a lot. I mean, it is a lot of streetcar lines that shows that way more people could have easily walked to jump on a streetcar from their home than can easily walk to one of our rapid transit lines today. It makes me jealous of the people back then, in a way.

Andy Woodruff:
[39:46] A lot of these were replaced by buses on wheels. I’m not sure that the service is better. Like, it’s probably worse. I’m not sure. But, you know, there’s actually a few that still survive that are part of the Green Line. But some of that’s been lost even in the MBTA era. So the whole A branch of the green line is gone. The E was truncated. It doesn’t go down all the way through JP anymore. And it seems like it doesn’t take much for that E branch to truncate at a Brigham Circle. Brigham Circle, right? Yeah.

Jake:
[40:19] When I did live in Mission Hill, well, first of all, I got off at Mission Park. So I got to get off in the middle of the street and try not to get flattened by a car every time the doors open. Who are supposed to stop when the trolley opens its doors, but a lot of people don’t realize that. But also at that time, you could still follow… Anytime there was road construction, you could see the old tracks under the asphalt going down South Huntington and down toward the Arbor Way that I think are mostly gone now.

Andy Woodruff:
[40:46] And then there’s also the old elevated railways in Boston is the other major thing. So that is part of what is the Orange Line today on both the north and south sides had elevated railway outside of downtown. So, the one went through Charlestown to Everett and then down through the south end of Roxbury along Washington Street, right, until Forest Hills. And those both were dismantled in the 70s and 80s and relocated. You might say that’s not lost transit, but it is for a lot of people.

Jake:
[41:15] For those neighborhoods.

Andy Woodruff:
[41:16] Yeah.

Jake:
[41:16] For those people.

Andy Woodruff:
[41:17] And it’s a little bit now out of reach for people who used to be able to just walk to the station. And it’s a racial justice issue, too, especially through Roxbury and things. It’s like the orange line shifted a little bit closer to more white people and away from some of the black neighborhoods. And the last thing on my map is, you know, now we say, well, this is silly. There’s no connection between North and South Station. But we used to have that. It was the Atlantic Avenue elevated. It ran along kind of the waterfront.

Jake:
[41:43] I just interviewed Scott Kerman about his book of conversations with Governor Dukakis. And that was one of the themes. That was obviously a pet project of the governor that never got built, was the north-south connector to connect north station to south station. So, yeah, looking at the book and seeing the Atlantic Avenue elevated, hey, guess what that connected?

Andy Woodruff:
[42:04] My understanding is that it mostly served kind of a busy waterfront area that, kind of ceased to be as busy over the years. People used to come across in ferries from East Boston and then get on this elevated to go wherever. But, you know, what is now the Blue Line? Took away some of that traffic. So, for whatever reasons, and I don’t know the full story, but the ridership was just not there anymore in the 30s and they closed it down and later dismantled the thing.

Jake:
[42:31] I really want to do a story about the East Boston Ferry one of these days for the show because it was such an institution. I think the ferry to East Boston or then Noddles Island started before the beginning of the 18th century. I think it was like 1690s and And it ran through 1952. There was a penny ferry through 1952. So I would love to talk about that at some point. It was a whole different way. I know the MBTA operates some ferries, but it’s not nearly as many people take ferries as used to. Oh, I’ll treat that as a little bit of a segue. That was a much more common way to experience Boston as a whole. From the founding of Boston as an English town in 1630 into the late 19th century, when trains finally overtook ships as a primary way to get around, most people who came to Boston from someplace else were going to come by sea. And so few of us, unless tourists might come and take a whale watch or there are some people who take a water taxi, but most people don’t get out on the

Jake:
[43:32] water and experience Boston from that side. But you have a cool map in here about marine traffic and sort of looking at, Boston Harbor with our 34 islands, I want to say. It’s a very complicated harbor with different paths that boats contain. There’s shallows and channels. And you look at some of the different ways that the harbor is used and how people go different places depending on how they’re using it. What do our maps tell us about how people use the harbor today?

Harbor Routes and Channels

Andy Woodruff:
[44:00] I kind of just want to add, like I wish… Boston we’re a little more connected to the water i just feel like the water is not really a part of the typical boston experience anymore you know you might take a little walk or the cruise but.

Jake:
[44:11] One of my high school friends is coming up with his son to visit in a couple of weeks and i’m basically insisting that we do either, uh go out to george’s island for the day or a whale watch or something that gets us out on the water because i love to experience boston that way Yeah.

Andy Woodruff:
[44:26] And what the maps here show are it’s tracked vessel locations over a period of six months or so. And I divided it into different types of vessels, which is in the data that I pulled for this. And I really knew nothing about this. So I was just kind of hunting around for something interesting to map about the water because it’s part of the story. The thing like all throughout boston’s history i think kind of a problem is that the harbor is like pretty shallow i believe and this is part of why you had like long wharfs sticking way out there and then, that is related to the land making that happened around those wharfs um so, in later times there’s dredging projects to create deeper channels through the harbor and those really show up in these maps, especially if it’s like a cargo ship there’s like one channel that they have to follow so it’s like a really thin line on the map with a little blob where they like are anchored to hang out if they need to.

Andy Woodruff:
[45:26] And then even the other types of vessels, the passenger ferries, of course, have the routes that serve their endpoints, but also follow those pretty specific paths. And even the pleasure vessels, like cruises or whatever, kind of follow those roadways, but spread out a little bit, especially among the islands. But the most nebulous one is the fishing, because they’re going to where fish are. And you can see there’s still like a coming from Fish Pier in South Boston, among other places. And they sort of follow these pathways till they get to the outer harbor. And then they just disperse. So, it’s really interesting to see the way people are still like traveling on the water and traveling. Roadways, essentially, that they take when they do so.

Jake:
[46:14] Yeah, I take a historical perspective, and I think of the original sort of President’s Road, King’s Road originally, and the President’s Road and the main channel before dredging. I look up above the camera that I’m talking to you on, I have a big 18th century map of Boston Harbor on the wall here with the headings to follow to get through the channel, the very narrow little channel that goes between Lovell’s Island and George’s Island, sort to tack in this way, and then you tack back to get around some shoals, and keep Governor’s Island on your right as you come into the inner harbor, and you see the compass headings to take coming in from the outer harbor through the narrows and into Long Wharf, and that’s still represented in your book by one of the channels, not that the commercial the cargo vessels take. They’re all in a newly dredged, a modern dredged channel, but the pleasure boats and a lot of the ferries, the passenger vessels, still weave through that original path. So, it’s cool to see that link to modern Boston back to the original channel. The reason that Boston Light, one of my favorite icons of Boston, the lighthouse on Little Brewster, one of the reasons it exists is to help people navigate that complicated channel.

Andy Woodruff:
[47:24] Yeah, it was interesting to learn. Really interesting stuff.

Boston’s People and Culture

Jake:
[47:27] I think we’re transitioning, yeah, here we go, into the section four of your book, The People and Culture. And again, I won’t keep you here all day, but I do want to ask about a few pages and maps throughout this section of the book, and I’m turning the page to the first map in this section, which is a map of population density. It includes Boston, it includes the near-end, most of your maps include the near-end chunk of Cambridge and Somerville. But what does this map tell us about where people live and how? Well, I was about to say where they live and where they don’t, but people live almost everywhere except Franklin Park and some of the golf courses and things like that. But where do the most people live?

Andy Woodruff:
[48:05] What you see in a map of population density is a high density in Cambridge, Somerville, and then obviously central Boston neighborhoods down through Dorchester, even in Brighton. Even part of Brookline is pretty densely populated, and then it falls off a little bit as you get farther away.

Jake:
[48:23] The key in your map has a color gradient scale going from a very light gray-blue that’s almost white for less densely populated areas up through dark blue where, there’s 30,000 people per square mile. And then the darkest color, there’s a red that we go to, and that is labeled Manhattanized. So what does that measure of Manhattanization mean to you or maybe mean to Boston?

Andy Woodruff:
[48:49] I wanted to include this to punch up this map a little bit and I guess just poke fun at like urban nimbyism. You see people everywhere always opposed to the new thing that’s proposed for their neighborhood. But what’s crazy to me is when people who already live in like a really dense neighborhood are like complaining that a dense thing is going to be built and then you will once in a while hear, oh, that the street’s going to be Manhattanized. And now I think what people mean by that is kind of cloaked in shadow by high-rise buildings. But what I did on the map was label any block that had a population density that was higher than the average of Manhattan. And I said, okay, look, these places are already like very dense. You kind of are Manhattanized already. Like you’re in a city. This is what cities are. So, I just wanted to highlight that. And those are concentrated in places where you’d expect the backside of Beacon Hill and the north end, but also student heavy areas. So, I believe the highest density block in Boston is in the Fenway near Northeastern. So there’s a chunk there, but also, you know, going out through Alston, Brighton, even some bits around Harvard. Those are the places with the very highest above Manhattan. Of course, that’s average of Manhattan. You know, if you just measured the residential parts of Manhattan, it would be even more higher bar to cross.

Jake:
[50:11] I worked for a little while right on Bookline Avenue in the Fenway. And that’s an area where I’ve really seen a change from when I first moved to the Boston area in the late 90s to today. And I’ve heard those fears of Manhattanizing the Fenway over the years. And now it’s a really charming area, lots of great restaurants, dense – it’s very walkable. It’s a very nice part of Boston, if you like a city, which why are you here if you don’t? But to have heard those complaints or those fears over the years and then walk down Brookline Ave today, it’s fine. We’re going to survive.

Andy Woodruff:
[50:47] And it’s just those fears are usually because people would rather have the gas

Andy Woodruff:
[50:51] station still be there or something instead of a functional space.

Immigration Then and Now

Jake:
[50:55] So we’ve talked a little bit about some of the maps that are indicative of past immigration patterns, like the triple-deckers tell us where, at a moment in time, the influx of immigrant communities were landing. We also have… A more explicit map about today’s immigrants and showing across different neighborhoods and different countries of origin where people who are born not in the U.S. Mostly live today. Can you talk a little bit about some of those patterns where different immigrant groups find themselves landing today?

Andy Woodruff:
[51:33] Sure. Yeah. I mean, some of it is not that different. There are some neighborhoods, especially in Dorchester, that have large immigrant populations, especially from the Caribbean. But it’s also East Boston. And I guess I don’t really know the immigration history of East Boston, but I think there was kind of an Italian neighborhood, right?

Jake:
[51:53] I think it’s really interesting to look at Boston immigration of past and present because you sort of see when each neighborhood closes the doors or doesn’t. Looking at your maps of immigration patterns today, I’m not really seeing a hotspot over South Boston. South Boston has this hugely Irish character because that’s sort of the moment when the door shut was after that wave of immigration. You look at the North End, all of Boston was sort of a homogenous English-descended Protestant-ish area until these different immigration ways. So, the North End was English descended, and then it was Irish, and then it was mostly Eastern European Jewish, and then it was Italian, and then the door sort of closed. So, it’s still like Boston’s little Italy today. East Boston’s always been that gateway community. So, it was all those things. It was English. It was Irish. It was Eastern European. It was hugely Italian, and now it’s mostly Latin America, Central America. It’s a great place to go where you can have like pupusas and then go get a cannoli because you have all those different communities and their foods represented. I love it there.

Andy Woodruff:
[53:04] East Boston shows up in a couple of my little maps here of, El Salvador and Colombia are kind of the big ones there. And it just plots a dot for every 10 people. And you can see the clusters of where these communities have settled. The countries themselves, of course, are quite different from the popular image of Boston. I don’t know when the Irish image is going to go away because obviously there are a lot of people with Irish heritage here, but it is definitely not the immigrant story today. So, it’s largely Caribbean, various Caribbean countries and some other Latin American countries. And, of course, China, you know, there’s a Vietnamese community concentrated around Fields Corner and that area. But, yeah, of course, you know, like many parts of Boston, like the Triple Deckers, this is largely kind of outside the tourist or like media view of Boston. So, I’m sure popular media and culture is, of course, happy to stick with the, like, white image versus the diverse, like, black communities.

Jake:
[54:06] You can just guarantee that a movie set in Boston is going to be white gangsters, right? It’s just like it’s a short – I’ve heard people say that Boston is Atlanta for white people, right? But when you look around the neighborhoods, that’s just not really –, case. The bank heist movie The Town is sort of like the fixed image of Boston for the media. It’s an easy shorthand, I guess, for movie makers. But in my neighborhood, I’m way more likely to run into somebody with a Haitian or Jamaican accent than an Irish accent. And I think that’s the case in a lot of parts of Boston.

Andy Woodruff:
[54:45] It’s been really curious to see. So, on the day that we’re talking later today is scheduled the Haiti versus Scotland, I believe, World Cup match down in Foxborough. And what I’ve been seeing is lots of coverage of Scottish people visiting Boston, but not much of the thousands of Haitian people who live here and what they’re excited for.

House of Pizza Map

Jake:
[55:06] Part of it is the kilts. So, that tells us a little bit about current immigration patterns. There is a map a few pages later, which I’m turning to, it’ll take me a second. It’s another way to think about past immigration patterns through the lens of pizza. I think this is a really cool map. And it’s something that I hadn’t really thought about. So you’re mapping a very certain subset of pizzerias around Boston. So what appears in your map of pizza in Boston?

Andy Woodruff:
[55:39] So this is a map of the so-called houses of pizza. And generally speaking any pizza place that has like house of pizza in its name or a pizza house perhaps so you’ll you know so i’ve lived in the past very close.

Jake:
[55:55] To boston house of pizza university house of pizza i occasionally now order from dedham house of pizza they’re everywhere.

Andy Woodruff:
[56:02] Yeah and as a general rule any place with that in its name is making what we call greek style pizza which is you know you can define it in some way i think it’s like made in a pan and it’s got a certain kind of crust and, so the map is just identifying that uh where those are i i, I did this map because I was really struggling to come up with a food map. I wanted a food map of Boston, and it actually is kind of hard to do. I couldn’t really nail down a specific food that Boston is known for that is really relevant. Baked beans are not really a thing now, and what would you map about that anyway? And, you know, we’re known for seafood, but mapping clam chowder isn’t really, unique. That’s what I worked on.

Jake:
[56:42] Like best lobster roll or something, yeah.

Andy Woodruff:
[56:43] Yeah. And a lot of that stuff is really regional.

Jake:
[56:47] So, where do we find these houses of pizza that we now know are Greek?

Andy Woodruff:
[56:52] They’re kind of everywhere. I mean, this is very common in the suburbs, really everywhere in New England. And I think this, I don’t really know the story of Greek populations in Boston, specifically, but somehow this pizza has spread all over New England. And this is the best I could come up with really for a food map because Boston, let’s say, is the capital of New England. So, you find it throughout neighborhoods and suburbs, but definitely not in the north end or East Boston, which have the Italian heritage.

Jake:
[57:18] Oh, that’s really – I hadn’t noticed that until you just pointed that out. There is a conspicuous absence of houses of pizza in those two areas.

Andy Woodruff:
[57:26] Yeah, I really wanted to map something a little more uniquely Boston, but some of the Boston foods are really not Boston. They’re like the roast beef on the North Shore, the clams in Essex and Ipswich, or the South Shore bar pizza. So, I decided to just go for something that’s New England-wide, and I really don’t know how –, took over like this. And I don’t know why the House of Pizza name is a thing, but I would love to learn a little more about that.

Jake:
[57:51] Yeah, I feel like there’s a dissertation waiting to be written out there if there’s a grad student who’s looking for a topic.

Dunkin’ Everywhere

Jake:
[57:59] Now, you said you wanted to include a food map that was relevant to Boston. And you close out the book with a very important map, not exactly food, although you can get a donut there, but more coffee. And if there’s one brand that I feel like especially over the last couple of decades has become just synonymous with Boston, it’s Dunks. Dunkin’s, sorry. So, you close out the book with a map that’s all about Dunkin’ Donuts.

Andy Woodruff:
[58:27] So, yeah, you can’t leave that out of a book of maps of Boston.

Jake:
[58:31] I like that it’s not just a list of a map of the pinpoint dots showing Dunkin’ Donuts locations. It’s more about people and people’s access to a Dunk. So, talk about of how you’re visualizing Dunkin’ Donuts here.

Andy Woodruff:
[58:44] Yeah, I’m sorry to say this might be the map that I spent the most time, like, analyzing the data on. So, some years ago on the Bostonography blog, Tim Wallace did a map of just distance to Dunkin’, and it was… Just kind of the straight, like, how far away are you from a Dunkin’ Donuts? And ever since then, I’ve always wanted to go a bit deeper and come up with this perfect Dunkin’ per capita per square mile combo metric that really gets at people’s access to Dunkin’ Donuts. As far as I got in this one is to show not simply distance, but walking or driving distance as a measure of your access to Dunkin’. So what the map shows is not the Dunkin’ Donuts locations other than the original one in Quincy. It shows this color overlay of how many can you get to within about 10 minutes of driving, hypothetically, assuming low to moderate traffic. And then also an overlay of areas that are within a 10-minute walk of at least one location.

Jake:
[59:52] I was happy to see that my house is located right inside the edge of one of, the walking areas. So I can walk barely to a dunks within the 10 minutes. And I think I’m also within a… I think I could drive to 2 to 10 within your framework.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:00:08] What are you saying?

Jake:
[1:00:09] 5 to 10 minute drive? Is that the…

Andy Woodruff:
[1:00:11] Yeah. I live near the edge of a two dunks blob for walking, I think, which is great, I guess. Much of the map is covered by that 2 to 10 color. And then when you get into the middle of Boston, it gets as high as 30. But again, this is hypothetical. There’s many locations downtown. You’re not going to be driving to them. They’re probably inside buildings. This is for the 9 to 5 crowd.

Jake:
[1:00:35] There are some Duncan deserts out there, too, and a few of them are obvious. So, like the runways of Logan Airport, you can’t walk to dunks within 10 minutes. Logan Airport’s huge.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:00:44] Of course, if you’re in the terminal, you can walk to lots of them.

Jake:
[1:00:46] And Stony Brook Reservation is a park. Nobody lives there. There are no dunks there.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:00:52] Yes.

Jake:
[1:00:52] Franklin Park. So, those are obvious ones, but there are other blank areas on the map.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:00:57] Yeah. When Tim did his simple distance map, I think he found, at the time, the farthest point within the city of Boston from a Dunkin’ Donuts was in a cemetery. So, basically, if you wanted to be far from Dunks, you had to be dead. But there is a Dunkin’ Desert, most notably, I would say, in the Chestnut Hill area, kind of southern Brookline, bits of West Roxbury and Newton. There are roads and people there.

Jake:
[1:01:21] Yeah, there are homes. There’s everything there.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:01:23] There would be, like, one.

Jake:
[1:01:25] Yeah.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:01:26] But there is not.

Jake:
[1:01:28] So, we have sampled just a smattering of the 50 maps that the reader will find in the book, Boston and 50 Maps, which is on shelves everywhere now. And we’ll have a link to buy the book in the show notes, of course, this week. Andy, if people who are listening want to find out more about you or maybe follow some of your work online, where can they look to find out more?

Andy Woodruff:
[1:01:51] I mean, I would maybe send people to my website. It’s just my name, andywoodruff.com. And it’s got some links to a couple of social media accounts and then some information about the work that I’ve done and what I do. Yeah, if anybody’s curious to know more or get in touch about maps or whatever else, I’ll show up.

Jake:
[1:02:11] Well, this is my very first interview ever with the cartographer. I’ve interviewed a lot of historians over the past decade or so. So, Andy Woodruff, I just want to say thanks so much for joining the show today and talking to us about Boston maps.

Andy Woodruff:
[1:02:23] Thank you so much. This was fun.

Jake:
[1:02:27] To learn more about Andy Woodruff and Boston in 50 maps, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 358. We’ll have an affiliate link where your purchase of Boston in 50 maps will help support the author, the show, and independent bookstores. We’ll also link to Andy’s personal website and social media profiles, along with his now mostly dormant Bostonography blog, where I first encountered his work. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I’m not super active on social media these days, but I still have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and as at hubhistory at better.boston over on Mastodon.

Jake:
[1:03:16] When I do post to social media and interact with listeners, it’s mostly on Blue Sky. You can find me on Blue Sky by searching for hubhistory.com. If you’re also not really on social media these days, you can still get in touch with me. Just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’d be happy to send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.