Street-Scale Stories of Boston’s Past Jump off the Pages

At the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s latest exhibition, historians and teen curators from Boston Public Schools zoom in on urban atlases.

By Garrett Dash Nelson President & Head Curator, Leventhal Map & Education Center

In January, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center opened a new exhibition, Building Blocks: Boston Stories from Urban Atlases. The installation dives into the Boston Public Library’s urban atlases collection — a set of materials that contain extraordinary detail of individual buildings and parcels of land — and includes the work of three teen curators from Boston Public Schools. The students pursued historical research projects that connect observations in the maps to the contemporary urban landscape. Building Blocks provides a chance to consider how Bostonians’ lives have been shaped by the spaces of the city around them.

The Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, and exhibitions like this one, is generously supported by the Boston Public Library Fund. The Center is located at the Central Library and is open to the public six days a week — free to all. Building Blocks is on display until August 19 and for information about visiting and guided tours, visit www.leventhalmap.org

Layers of History to Explore

The Building Blocks exhibition draws on the same urban atlases that are featured in the Leventhal Center’s custom digital tool Atlascope. Using Atlascope, you can peel back layers of history, jumping through time in atlases that have been “warped” so that they act like modern Web maps. The Leventhal Map & Education Center is widely recognized for its innovative digital geohumanities work. To access Atlascope, visit www.atlascope.org