• This website includes dozens of videos, hundreds of essays, and thousands of drawings created over the past twenty years. Search to learn more about the history of buildings, places, prisons, Newark, New York City, and my PhD research on spatial inequality.

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Tag Archives: data visualization

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University of Michigan Campus Drawing

  12 April 2024 ,

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I made a map of each place where I lived an extended period of time: Newark, New York City, Oxford University, Columbia University, and now the University of Michigan. This map depicts almost every major landmark on the University’s central campus and took about 300 hours to create over the past 18 months. Click the image for full resolution or scroll down for details.
Medium: ink on paper with watercolor wash
Dimensions: 26 by 45 inches (66 by 114 centimeters)
Sources: synthesized from Google Earth, satellite images, maps, and street view
Please contact [email protected] to order artist quality prints of this image. The image can be printed at any size you need: as small as 10 inches to as large as 180 inches wide with no loss in image quality.

 

View full size image >

Image is provided at resolution suitable for viewing, but not for large-format printing.
Please contact me for the source file.

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1. Image Annotated with Building Names:

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Buildings on State Street
Buildings on State Street
President's House
President’s House

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2. Work in Progress:

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Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
Work in Progress

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3. Detail Views:

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Engineering Building Tower
Engineering Building Tower
Newberry Hall
Newberry Hall
Detail of the Diag
Detail of the Diag
Last to Graduate in the Class
Last to Graduate in the Class
Protesters
Protesters
Three Soldiers
Three Soldiers
Detail of Pedestrians on Diag
Detail of Pedestrians on Diag
Detail of Windows on History Department
Detail of Windows on History Department
Rackham Building
Rackham Building
Michigan Theater
Michigan Theater
Michigan Theater
Michigan Theater
Rowdy Fraternity Party
Rowdy Fraternity Party
Car Crash at Michigan Union
Car Crash at Michigan Union

 

Angell Hall
Angell Hall
Engineering Arch
Engineering Arch
Engineering Arch
Engineering Arch
Clements Library
Clements Library
Crowd
Crowd
People on Lawn
People on Lawn
First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor
First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor
First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor
First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor
First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor
First Congregational Church of Ann Arbor
Hill Auditorium
Hill Auditorium
The Cube Sculpture
The Cube Sculpture
Law School Reading Room Window
Law School Reading Room Window
Law School Tower
Law School Tower
Cartman in Law School
Cartman in Law School
Law School Window Detail
Law School Window Detail
Law School Window Detail
The Law School
The Law School
Wedding
Wedding
Wheelchair
Wheelchair
Campus
Campus

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Image is provided at resolution suitable for viewing, but not for large-format printing.
Please contact me for the source file.
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Setting Up Sex Offenders for Failure

  9 April 2024 , ,

How the intersection of law and city planning exposes sex offenders to longer prison sentences

Published to the AGORA: Issue 18, 2023-24
The Urban Planning and Design Journal at the University of Michigan

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Abstract:

Our nation’s laws for sex offenders, although designed to protect the public, often have the opposite effect: increasing the chance sex offenders will be re-arrested and re-convicted for new crimes. The core of the problem is not that public safety rules, like Megan’s Law, are too weak. The problem is that these laws are written too strongly and too powerfully that they have the reverse effect: increasing the chances that sex offenders will commit new crimes. There are many problems with sex offender laws: too weak in areas they should be stronger; too strong in areas where they should be more flexible. But today I will examine just one aspect of the sex offender registry (the home address requirement) and how it affects one place (New York City). This analysis of New York City points to concrete and better ways to protect public safety than the current system: ways that reforming Megan’s Law will increase public safety.

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Article:

Download article as PDF / open in new window >

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Acknowledgements:

Thank you to dissertation advisers Dan O’Flaherty for his research on homelessness and Mary Gallagher for her advice on case law. This essay was originally written for Heather Ann Thompson’s fall 2023 PhD seminar on The American Carceral State. Most of all, thank you to editor Jessie Williams for her patient and insightful line edits.
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Homeownership and the Racial Wealth Gap

  5 March 2024 , , ,
Presented March 5, 2024 at the Newark Public Library

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The world’s largest concentration of wealth is in the New York City metropolitan area, yet the region contains many under-resourced cities, including Newark. What historical factors created this division between low-income Newark and its wealthy neighbors along lines of race, housing, income and social class?
The agents of change are more complex and nuanced than a simple narrative of redlining and white flight following the 1967 uprising. From discriminatory actions by the Federal Housing Administration and highways that carved through the urban fabric, to suburbs that pulled middle-class families away from Newark and factories that relocated outside of the city, contemporary poverty in Newark was more than a century in the making.
Drawing from the archives of the Newark Public Library, this presentation examines the range of challenges Newark faces and how the city overcomes. This is a Newark History Society program, co-sponsored by NJPAC and the Newark Public Library. Light refreshments will be served.
The presenter is Myles Zhang, urban historian and doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
This presentation will evolve into my dissertation entitled:
“An island of poverty in a vast ocean of material prosperity”:
Homeownerhip and the Racial Wealth Gap in Newark

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1959 Blight Map

1959 Map of “Blighted” Areas by Newark Central Planning Board

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View event on NJPAC website

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Jersey City: Urban Planning in Historical Perspective

  4 February 2024 , ,
This project in two parts is a brief history of city planning in Jersey City
and a building-level interactive map of the entire city in 1873, 1919, and today.

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Read / download book as PDF

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Jersey City: Urban Planning in Historical Perspective
A booklet about the history of the master plan

Over its four-century history, the evolution of Jersey City mirrors the larger history of the New York region. Each generation of Jersey City residents and political leaders have faced different urban challenges, from affordable housing, to clean water, to air pollution, and income inequality. Each generation has responded through the tools of city planning and the master plan.
Jersey City’s six master plans – dated 1912, 1920, 1951, 1966, 1982, and 2000 – capture the city at six historical moments. Reading these plans and comparing them to each other is a lens to understand urban history, and American history more broadly.

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Classroom Discussion Questions

1. How has the built environment of Jersey City evolved in the past century?
2. Who has the right to plan a city?
3. Who has the right to shape a city’s future?
4. Do you feel you have power over the plan of your city?

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Eastern State Penitentiary Construction Sequence

  31 October 2023 , , ,

Time-lapse animation of the prison’s entire design – building by building virtual model – from the 1820s to present.

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“The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness, allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, 1850

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Based on:
– Historic architectural plans (1837 report in French, pp. 124-38)
– Primary sources (1830 description)
– Reports on the historic preservation of this prison (1994 Historic Structures Report, Volume II)
Music by Philip Glass from the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, starting at minute 37:30
Link to text of audio narration

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Computer Model

Shows prison as it appeared in the period 1836 to 1877 before later construction obstructed the original buildings.

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Built on a Billion-Dollar Bed of Corporate Tax Breaks

  6 October 2023 , ,

What kinds of tax breaks are we giving to redevelop Downtown Newark?
Who is getting them?

An investigative report on public funds for private profit.

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“Free enterprise is a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.”
– Noam Chomsky

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Contents

[1] Who owns the land around Mulberry Commons?

[2] If past predicts future, what kind of past tax breaks have we given?

[3] The problem is not tax breaks. The problem is: Who gets them?

[4] How can we ensure equitable economic development in Newark?
Five policy recommendations.

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Artist’s rendering of Newark Penn Station expansion

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Introduction: A Case Study in Edison Parking

The City of Newark borrowed $110 million to pay for a pedestrian bridge over Route 21. This new link between Mulberry Commons and Penn Station will allow travelers, event goers, and sports fans to walk directly from the trains to the games at the arena. Newark City Hall and the media are describing this as Newark’s equivalent and response to New York City’s High Line. This project follows on the already $10 million spent on building Mulberry Commons.
As part of misguided car-centered 20th-century urban planning, thousands of highways were built in our nation through low-income communities of color, to divide the less privileged in hundreds of places like Newark. Through the tools of public investment in public space, now is a moment to make wrong historical injustices like Route 21, Route 22, Interstate 78, and Interstate 280. Now is a historic opportunity for the urban form as tool of reparations.
However, what parts of the public – divided across lines of race, income, and home address – will benefit the most from this project? Will the benefits of this investment disproportionately go to a few people or institutions, such as Prudential Center patrons and Edison Parking tenants?

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Time-lapse Animation of Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

  21 May 2023 , , , ,

This animation reconstructs the exact conditions of the workplace, the locations of each fallen body, and the progress of the 1911 fire minute by minute. It is in an accurate-to-the-inch virtual reality model based on trial records, police reports, original measured plans, and primary sources.

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Audio testimonies from:
Pauline Newman letter from May 1951, 6036/008, International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Archives. Cornell University, Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives.
Louis Waldman eyewitness in Labor Lawyer, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1944, pp. 32-33.
Anna Gullo in the case of The People of the State of New York v. Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, December 11, 1911, pp. 362.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire on Saturday, March 25, 1911 was the deadliest fire in New York City history and one of the deadliest fires in American history. The factory was located on floors eight, nine, and ten of the Asch Building, built in 1901 for various garment sweatshops in Manhattan’s West Village.
To prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks, to reduce theft, and to block union organizers from entering the factory, the exit doors to the stairwells were locked – a common and legal practice at the time. As a result, more than half of the ninth floor workers could not escape the burning building.
As a result of the fire and lack of workplace protections, 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – died by fire, smoke inhalation, or jumping and falling from the 9th floor windows. Most victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23.
After the fire, factory owners Max Blanck and Isaac Harris were not convicted and were ruled “not guilty.” They “compensated” each victim’s family a mere $75. The fire led to news laws requiring fire sprinklers in factories, safety inspections, and improved working conditions. The fire also motivated the growing International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that organized sweatshop workers to fight for a living wage, job protections, and the right to unionize.
Click on individual annotations in model to fly around the factory and follow the time sequence of the fire.

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Virtual Reality Model

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Primary Sources

– Cornell University’s Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives (website)
– The 1,500 page transcript of witness and survivor testimonies (transcript)
– Victim names and causes of death (source and map of victim home addresses)
– Original architectural plans of the building used in the trial (PDF plans and source)

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Architectural Plans

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Stairway of death: view looking up the Washington Place stairway that was locked during the fire

Audio Sources

– Horse drawn carriage
– Power loom
– Workplace bell
– Classroom
– Large crowd
– Elevator
– Small fire
– Large fire
– Fire truck bell
– Fire hose
– Dull thud
– Heartbeat
– Closing song: Solidarity Forever by Pete Seeger, 1998
– Closing song: Solidarity Forever by Twin Cities Labor Chorus, 2009