Ask a New Yorker to fill in a blank map of Manhattan and you could get anything from a play-by-play of a person’s sexual conquests to a heartbreaking journey through four decades of true love.
That’s because, as writer and artist Becky Cooper puts it, “maps reveal more about their makers than the places they describe.”
Since 2009, Cooper has distributed nearly 3,000 blank maps to New Yorkers, asking them to fill it in and mail it to her. She has compiled the best 75 responses in a new book, “Mapping Manhattan.”
Cooper, 25, came up with the idea for the project in 2007 while studying at Harvard. There, she hand-printed an outline of the borough with only two lines drawn inside — one for Houston Street and one for Broadway — as well as a rectangle representing Central Park. Otherwise, the map is empty and ready to be filled in by the odd imaginations found on the streets of the city.
“Sometimes I chose a person because her heels were awesome,” she writes. “But most of the time, I just chose people who were open to the world — without headphones, curious.”
She has given maps to a psychic on St. Marks, MTA employees, tourists, Columbia med students, Mister Softee drivers, Central Park portraitists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and street vendors.
She soon discovered that almost all of the maps she got back — around 200 — were “accidental autobiographies.”
“When people don’t realize they’re revealing themselves, they’re apt to lay themselves much more bare,” she writes.
Images from “Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers,” by Becky Cooper; foreword by Adam Gopnik, to be published in April by Abrams Image.