BPL Central Library – Newsfeed Café
Sep 19, 2023
5:30 EDT
Free
Join us for a curatorial introduction to our new exhibition, Getting Around Town: Four Centuries of Mapping Boston in Transit, featuring a roundtable talk on transit in Boston, a Q+A session, and an opportunity to explore the material on display.
This program will be held in person in the Newsfeed Café. The reception will begin at 5:30 pm and the speaking program will begin at 5:50 pm with small group gallery tours to follow. This event is at full capacity and there are no additional tickets available.
How do Bostonians get from here to there in a city full of trains, trolleys, ferries, and more? Whether in the familiar colored lines of today’s MBTA map or the complicated timetables of long-vanished omnibus routes, maps have long been an indispensable instrument for getting around town. This exhibition will feature an extraordinary collection of transit maps dating from the seventeenth century to the present, and invites questions about how people have moved around the city in the past, present, and future.
Steven Beaucher is the guest curator of the Getting Around Town exhibition. He is the co-founder and proprietor of WardMaps LLC, dealing in antique maps and public transportation artifacts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Steven established and operates MBTAgifts, the licensed merchandise program of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority. Steven is a licensed architect, who, before focusing on WardMaps and the creation of Boston in Transit, practiced architecture throughout Greater Boston. He grew up in the Merrimack Valley, graduated from Syracuse University, and resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Taylor Dolven is a reporter at the Boston Globe mostly focused on the safety and reliability crises at the MBTA. She has broken news stories about the FTA’s safety investigation of the T, the Orange Line shutdown, and the new general manager. She often writes about how the MBTA’s failures are impacting the daily lives of people in Greater Boston, who are increasingly losing out on wages and opting for cars over transit as service continues to deteriorate. Before joining the Globe in September 2021, Taylor covered the tourism industry on the business desk at the Miami Herald.
Garrett Dash Nelson is the President and Head Curator at the Leventhal Map & Education Center. He is a historical geographer whose work focuses on the relationship between community structure, geographic units, and political ideology. He holds an AB from Harvard College in Social Studies and Visual & Environmental Studies, an MA from the University of Nottingham in Landscape & Culture, and a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Geography.
