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The New York Public Library is busy renovating a room at the main branch in midtown to display its extensive map collection. It won't be ready until early winter, but starting today the library is dusting off some of those maps for an exhibit called: "Treasured Maps." WNYC's Richard Hake took a preview tour and found that the library is not only home to books, but to one of the greatest map collections in the World.

Across the from the famous main reading room at the New York Public Library, the Chief of the Map Division explains what’s in the storage space under Bryant Park. Alice Hudson says the library has some 400-thousand maps and 20-thousand atlases and books about maps. It’s one of the ten greatest map collections in the world.

We don’t have a lot of globes.

RH: 30 globes? You have to have a globe in a map room. At least one.

When the new room is finished the globes will be displayed, but for now you can view some 80 rarely seen maps in the 3rd Floor Solomon Gallery.

There’s some beautiful antiquarian maps and then there’s some quirky, odd maps that just reflect some of the maps and map making.

The exhibit starts with historical maps of the 17th century that document the way the universe was viewed in those days. It shows maps all the way up to New York City neighborhoods of the present and everything in between. Hudson points out maps that show explorers routes and what was known during the time period.

This was a nautical chart probably used at sea and you can see down here where the ink is worn off where somebody’s hand or elbow was down here and it has tack marks so it’s been up on a wall or in some protective frame.

One post Civil War map, shows every single building and street in New York City from a birds eye view. It’s strikingly similar to those images you can see on earth-google on the internet today.

Yeah, because you can zoom in and see these buildings at about this scale actually. Because when you zoom too close you lose the clarity.

Today modern technology uses satellites and aircraft to bring us those images. Back then Hudson says it was the cartographer’s eye.

I think he walked every block. Every street. But also church steeples and hot air balloons.

To see how the city, the world and the universe looked. You can visit the New York Public Library and its exhibit called Treasured Maps…not treasure map…But Treasured Maps starting today. For WNYC, I’m Richard Hake.

» Information on The New York Public Library’s exhibit Treasured Maps: Celebrating The Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division
» History of cartography and maps on the Leonard Lopate Show