Charting old territory: Paper maps making comeback
Courtesy of Samantha Cortese
For Samantha Cortese, adding texture to the continents is the most satisfying part of painting a map masterpiece for a client’s home. Cortese has been interested in paper maps since she was a kid collecting the maps used on her family’s travels.
Courtesy of Samantha Cortese
Gracing Samantha Cortese’s wall is a world map depicting her past travels and dream destinations. Cortese often talks with her kids about the map, sharing stories of different cultures and helping them locate countries and regions.
Courtesy of Destinee Notaro
Destinee Notaro was drawn to a custom map by local artist Samantha Cortese, and commissioned her own. This map, which borrows colors from Notaro’s area rug and bohemian décor, greets guests to her home.
Mark Hofmann/For the Observer-Reporter
Albert Sloan, a volunteer at the Uniontown Public Library, looks over a map in the library’s Pennsylvania Room.
Mark Hofmann/For the Observer-Reporter
Uniontown Public Library’s Pennsylvania Room has a number of maps that allow patrons to retrace the past. Library volunteer Albert Sloan, of Uniontown, is shown looking over one of the many books of maps.
Mark Hofmann/For the Observer-Reporter
Mark Hofmann/For the Observer-Reporter
Albert Sloan, a volunteer at the Uniontown Public Library, recalled using a patent map to locate the property of James McCoy, which was, in the 1700s, near property owned by the Gaddis family.
Courtesy of Samantha Cortese
Samantha Cortese’s childhood bedroom is still decorated in the map posters she made, detailing young adulthood travels.
Today’s travelers and home decorators are charting old territory: the paper map.
“We’re having a banner year in travel,” said Jim Garrity, director of public affairs for AAA East Central. “Travel’s alive and well. It’s back and beautiful.”
Back at the forefront of AAA travel, too, are TripTiks, step-by-step directions people over a certain age remember printing before hitting the road. Today, AAA and CAA offer digital TripTiks, which can be used similarly to a GPS direction app, with the option to print.
“Every year, we generate approximately 10 million TripTiks across the U.S. and Canada. There has been an increase in demand since COVID because, if you think about it, as we were kind of getting out of those early stages of the pandemic and people were starting to reintroduce themselves to travel, people were relying on road trips,” Garrity said, noting flying was tricky and national parks lent themselves to social distancing adventure.
TripTiks are AAA’s most popular map, and they’re almost equally as popular among wanderlust-ers ages 25 to 34 as they are with travelers between 45 and 54.
“While we’ve seen obviously a push toward more modern options and online and virtual options, there is still something nostalgic and kind of romantic about a paper map,” Garrity said. “A lot of our members enjoy pulling out a map. If you’re going out on a road trip, it’s not a bad idea to have it as a backup. You may not think you need it, but who knows?”
TripTiks and paper maps are certainly enjoying a resurgence, appearing as an aesthetic on social media, being used on trips and gracing walls as home décor.
“I’ve just always been obsessed with globes and maps, ever since I traveled when I was younger,” said Samantha Cortese, of Washington, who collected maps and turned them into gigantic posters still decorating her childhood bedroom. “My brother played soccer; we would go all over, and I just remember this was back way before cellphones and MapQuest. We would go to the AAA and you’d get your maps to where you were going, and that’s how you would find your way into a city or find your way around a city. (My parents) always had their maps out, and it would be highlighted and then we’d hit traffic and everybody’s like, OK, which way are we going? You can’t even imagine doing that nowadays.”
Those who religiously follow Google or Apple maps or WAZE can’t imagine having to reroute themselves; GPS does that for you. But Angela DeThomas, of Washington, never seeks adventure without a paper map.
“For the longest time, people were going away from (maps); oh, there’s an app, go to our website. Now you’re starting to see more paper maps and brochures and things like that are starting to come back,” said DeThomas, who alongside her husband, Joe DeThomas, served as a Scout leader for decades and travels with him to scenic but remote locales. “I think they realized one, people are starting to get away from smartphones, and your phone wouldn’t work in those areas anyways.”
DeThomas chooses paper over digital maps when exploring Pocahontas County, located in the National Radio Quiet Zone, where phone GPS doesn’t work, and the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon. She prefers maps found at small tourism and visitors centers, the ones created specifically for that area or trail, over traditional state maps, because they’re more detailed.
DeThomas has also relied on paper maps in the Big Apple, when trying to navigate New York’s subway system.
“I was trying to figure out the subway app, which train, what color, what number. Phone service is rather spotty sometimes in New York City. My husband had a paper map of the subway system and he was able to map it out and find our way,” she said.
Though Cortese and her husband, Donny Cortese, rely on Siri for directions to places near and far, the mother of two still collects paper maps (she’s got several from her honeymoon abroad) and even uses them at theme parks, including Disney World.
“There’s something that you can’t duplicate with an app on your phone when you actually have a paper map in your hand and you can visually see the whole picture,” Cortese said. “Your screen is smaller, and then you zoom in and then you lose sight of the bigger picture. There’s just something about having this tangible map – there’s no replacing (it).”
Cortese has a map above her bed – a Christmas gift from her parents, with pushpins marking the places she’s been – that serves as a sentimental piece of wall art and a conversation starter for her kids.
“They’re obsessed with it,” Cortese laughed. “They’ll look at it and look at the push pins and they’ll ask me where the places are. Or they’ll hear about a country on TV or in school and they’ll be like, ‘Where’s Greenland?’ I can show them on the map where it is. They’ll point to something and ask me where it is, and then I have a story to share about it. It’s just nice to have that reminder of, we live in this littler corner of the globe, but there’s this huge world out there.”
For Cortese, not only do maps serve as guides or decoration, but they’re unique works of art, all different, with varied color schemes and fonts, depicting countless snippets of the globe.
“Everybody knows what an atlas looks like or what a map of a certain city looks like. It has its own borders and boundaries, but then as an artist or anybody creating that map, that’s your opportunity to reflect your own interests or your own personality,” she said.
Cortese, a self-taught contemporary artist whose work is featured in the ARC building in Canonsburg and other area galleries, infuses her abstractionist style into maps custom-made for clients. The not-quite-paper maps make stunning statement pieces.
Destinee Notaro, of South Franklin, commissioned a map painting after seeing a piece Cortese shared to her Instagram account.
The map painting is blue with thick, textured off-white continents, and is one of the first things guests see when they walk into Notaro’s bohemian-style home, which is decorated in globes and elephants.
For Notaro, maps carry some nostalgia.
“I feel like it’s a thing of the past. I feel like my generation was the last one to learn (maps),” said Notaro, a Millennial. “I don’t know if globes are even accurate anymore. As a project in social studies in elementary school, I did the globe of the world. I guess that I’ve always been intrigued by what it looks like. I couldn’t read a map, but I’m interested in a map itself.”
Interest in maps takes different forms. For many visitors to the Uniontown Public Library, maps are less a route charted from here to there and more a snapshot of the past.
“We had a question that came in about the location of a place called Fort McCoy,” said Albert Sloan, a Uniontown native and library volunteer.
Sloan recalled using a patent map to locate the property of James McCoy, which was, in the 1700s, near property owned by the Gaddis family.
“We were able, using this patent map, to figure out approximately the location of the (McCoy) property by looking at the streams that were marked, different forks in the stream, that type of thing. We could see the Gaddis property on this patent map. We know that Gaddis was close to Route 119 in Uniontown,” said Sloan. “I finally found where the plaque was located.”
The location, Sloan said, was revealed in a 1904 edition of the Genius of Liberty, one of Uniontown’s first newspapers.
Maps show the distribution of wealth in an area, show how county borders change (in its infancy, Pennsylvania had only three counties, and Greene, Washington and Fayette all broke from Westmoreland, Sloan said) and how towns grow or fade.
“We have maps that go back to 1857, atlases that were published in 1857, then we have newer maps, too,” Sloan said. “We have maps that show topography, maps that show where coal deposits were in the area. There’s just so many different kinds,” he said, noting that historically, maps are incredibly important.
Even though he spends a lot of time with maps, Sloan does rely on GPS to get where he’s going, though he believes the paper map still has a place as a navigational tool in today’s society.
“Why do we have maps? Because you might be someplace where a GPS system fails you. Now you need a map,” Sloan said, remembering a time his GPS got him lost on a trip with his father to the VA hospital in Pittsburgh. “I had no idea where I was going. I’m not going to say that map’s always going to be accurate, but it’s going to definitely show you where places are, while a GPS might guide you into a field. When I was younger … I would use a paper map. When I finally got to (my destination), I knew exactly how to get there because I paid attention. If I want to go visit one of my children, I have no idea how to get there other than the GPS system.
“I think people have a better sense of direction when they’re using a paper map than when they’re relying on the GPS to take them someplace.”
Since ancient times, humankind has relied on maps to orient them (Imago Mundi, the oldest map on earth, places Babylon at the center of the world), to guide them, to record and understand history. Maps have been drawn and redrawn (recently, 7,000 islands were discovered in Japan, which means a new map of that area is forthcoming). They’ve fascinated human beings and will last, perhaps because the map is so rooted in the human psyche.
“Everybody knows what the globe looks like, the atlas looks like. It’s so universal,” Cortese said.