Last Tuesday I wrote about visual artist Tim Anderson rediscovering a painting he had made 15 years ago of the city of Chicago containing, to his calculations and research, some 198 different neighborhoods. He found the painting and had it professionally photographed, had copies made and began selling them.
I praised the map and I praised the artist — and also the man who had commissioned the map as part of CITY 2000, that ambitious effort to capture photographically the city and its citizens over the course of that year.
That man was Gary Comer, whose love for the city of his birth manifested, once he had made all the dough he would ever need as the founder of Lands’ End, in all manner of philanthropic endeavors, such as Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago and the Gary Comer Youth Center in the Grand Crossing neighborhood where he was born and raised. (CITY 2000’s 500,000-some images have long been available through University of Illinois at Chicago, and recently nearly 15,000 of those photos have become even more accessible at the snazzy new Chicago Collections site, www.chicagocollections.org.)
The day that story appeared, I and some editors here heard from Christopher Devane, who runs a company called Big Stick/Neighborhood Ties, claiming that Anderson and Comer had, to put it mildly, co-opted his work.
“I was the first with a Chicago neighborhood map,” he said.
Devane did create and start to market a map of the city in 1992 that was made up of 182 neighborhoods. He titled it the “Chicago Neighborhood Map.” When Anderson’s “CITY 2000 Neighborhood” map first appeared in 2000 — selling what Anderson recalls was only a “handful of copies, since most were given away” — Devane called the artist, who freely admitted and does to this day that “I used a number of various things for my research.”
Anderson directed Devane to Comer. The two never spoke. The matter passed.
Devane’s map, his career, was born in a tavern in the Beverly neighborhood in which he was raised. “I was sitting with a friend in the real estate business and we were having a contest: Who could name the most neighborhoods?” says Devane, who had served for more than a decade in the Illinois Air National Guard. “As I started to pull away, he said, ‘You should make a map.’ “
And, after much research and many conversations with Chicagoans, he made his map, and it was granted a 1992 U.S. Library of Congress copyright.
Devane and his company fashioned a second edition of the city neighborhood map in 2001 (with 222 neighborhoods) and another in 2005 (237 neighborhoods).
He says that he has sold thousands of them, and there are maps of other cities on his website (www.bigstickinc.com).
He didn’t think much about the Anderson map after its debut and just went about his own mapmaking business until 2012, when he claimed that the city was using his work in its map. That city map’s origins trace to 1978, when the Department of Planning did a fairly thorough job of charting the city’s neighborhoods. That map contained 228 neighborhoods. Since the city is an organic thing, neighborhoods came and went over the years. One of the most recent versions of the city map displeased Devane, prompting his public claim that for nearly a decade the city had been using his work for its maps on the city’s website.
He told foxnews.com bluntly in 2012, “they plagiarized my map.”
He attempted to get in touch. “I wrote a number of letters to (the mayor), very polite letters, very civilized,” he says. “I was totally ignored.”
What Devane wanted was not only some financial remuneration for using his work — “which they could have gotten for a song,” he says — but also acknowledgment.
Legal remedies? The problem with copyright infringement is that facts about the size and shape of neighborhoods are not considered copyrightable.
“To sue might take millions of dollars and millions of years,” Devane says.
In my story last Tuesday I called Anderson’s map “perhaps the finest and most attractive map ever made of this city.” That is, of course, in the eye of this beholder. Maybe you’d prefer another. You can see Devane’s map in the accompanying photo and on his website; Anderson’s map/my story here and the city map, and there is more than one, here.
It’s your aesthetic call. I like them all, actually.
That’s because there is something so compelling about maps. As Joshua Hammer wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, in a review of four map books, “Maps anchor us, give coherence to our environment, help make visual sense of otherwise intangible realities.”
He also quotes the Library of Congress cartography expert John Hessler, who writes of the books, “The map as a concept is complex and ever changing.”
Anderson (www.timandersonart.com) has sold a few copies of his map and is devoting himself to his other painting. He had no plans to update his “CITY 2000 Neighborhoods” map.
Devane will be issuing a fourth edition of his map in mid-2016. He says, “Not only will it be a wall map, but there will be an online opportunity for Chicagoans to adjust the borders of their neighborhoods through the years.”
This map, he says, will also feature 16 border illustrations “of those who best exemplify individual achievement in Chicago history.” Among them will be Mother Frances Cabrini, Enrico Fermi and Mavis Staples.
He adds: “Maps are no different than calendars. They change.”
So, as I wrote in last week’s story, “There are, by the count of cartographers and real estate developers and politicians, God knows how many neighborhoods in Chicago.”
Unfortunately but understandably, God was unavailable to provide the definitive answer.
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
