Neighborhood Atlas Maps

Six Schools, One Zip Code.

Data-Driven Map

I built this map in Google My Maps using data pulled from NYSED's school report cards and enrollment database. I chose six schools within a 30 minute walk of central Glendale. I wanted to see how much school quality can vary inside a neighborhood small enough to walk across.

The answer surprised me. Once I colored the map by percent proficient in science, the gap between the highest and lowest performing schools was wide, even though every one of them serves the same small area. Adding percent white enrollment and per-pupil spending made the pattern harder to read as coincidence. Rothstein's The Myth of De Facto Segregation argues that patterns like this are not "the result of untold number of private decisions about where to live" (Rothstein, 2019). They come from specific mid-20th century policy, like the FHA and VA loans that built whites-only communities across Queens and the wealth those policies handed some families while excluding others. That history is still visible today in which Glendale school a kid ends up at and what resources follow them.

I want viewers to walk away from this map with a harder question than "which school is better." I want them asking why one small, walkable neighborhood holds this much variation in the first place, and whose decisions put it there.

Glendale in 20 minutes

88th Street, NTK

Soundscape Map 1 of 2

I made this soundmap sitting for 10 minutes facing the street in front of NTK (local restaurant next to PS 113) on 88th St, marking each sound by direction and switching colors whenever I felt like it.

I picked this spot because it's a commercial corner rather than a park, and I wanted a soundscape that would be diferent then the first one, a business strip instead of green space. What I caught here were small human moments: a deli owner arguing with a shipment handler about how the order was wrong, a mom telling her kids to go inside, families waiting out a holiday together. I also noticed a school bus that was empty when around the time that I was there, it shouldve been packed with kids going home for the day.

I want viewers to sit with those small moments and ask what it means that this corner is full of adult life and business, but quiet on kids, and what that says about how the summer is here in Glendale.

Dry Harbor Playground

Soundscape Map 2 of 2

I made this soundmap by sitting near the basketball courts at Dry Harbor Playground for 10 minutes, drawing a circle on paper with myself at the center facing the courts. I marked each sound where I heard it, switching colors as time went on. Myrtle Ave ran along the edge of my circle the whole time.

I picked this spot because it's a park, and I wanted to hear what a recreational space in Glendale sounds like once you stop looking and start listening. What I got was pretty normal for a park in the summer: kids nearly getting into it over a basketball game, someone blasting hip-hop/rap, birds and squirrels doing their own thing, and steady honking from traffic, all inside the same ten minutes.

I want viewers to notice how much is happening on top of itself in one small space, conflict and play and nature and busy traffic all sharing the same ten minutes and the same small radius. I want them to ask what that says about how lively this neighborhood is and how students could thrive in Glendale.

Becoming a Local

Qualitative, Subjective map

I drew this map freehand, tracing one route instead of the whole neighborhood: the entry ramp off the Jackie Robinson Parkway, down into the road next to Dry Harbor Playground, past the deli, into the streets of Glendale. I mainly free sketched everything with marker as I imagined it, letting the line change as it moved down the page. Near the ramp the road goes into a fork that leads the driver either into Glendale or to the left towards Forest Hills. By the time it reaches the deli and the side streets, you're officially in the neighborhood and can experience what locals call home.

I picked this route because it is the one that I would always come on when I would visit my now wife's family when we were long distance. I wanted the map to track a feeling instead of a geography, the shift from passing through a place to recognizing it, and eventually to claiming it as mine that I commute on an almost daily basis. The ramp still felt like arriving somewhere that I was getting very familiar with and recognizing where to go for what was becoming common knowledge. The deli became a place I thought of stopping at to help with groceries for previously my wife's family but now my family. The side streets stopped being directions and started being home.

I want viewers to notice the line itself changing more than the landmarks along it. I want them to ask what it actually takes for a place to stop being "visiting" and start being "home," and whether that shift comes from time, from repetition, from people, or from all three at once.

Infrastructure You Can Teach

This is a single page photo map made from ten photos taken on the neighborhood walk in Glendale, with the actual GPS route from the walk laid over the top and a "why" question written under each photo.

I wanted to build this around one idea, that you can get a kid to actually stop and look at a manhole cover instead of walking past it. Every photo here is something people usually don't stop for, a bus stop next to a cemetery, an eviction notice on a gate, a staircase built over a highway instead of a crosswalk. None of these have an obvious answer, they're just things that exist until you ask why they're existing in the neighborhood in the way that it is.

I want somebody to look at this and think about their own why questions. Infrastructure is something I could teach with, not just something in the background. If a teacher could take this idea and get their own students asking why about their own block, that's my why.

Where the Bus Stops

This is a single page photo grid, eight photos from the same walk that a teenager would take and actually notice on this block.

I kept thinking about how different this walk would look through a teenager's eyes instead of my own. I'd notice a manhole cover. A teenager would notice whose porch has the Knicks flag up, which dead end street is quiet enough to hang out on and how long the actual walk to the bus stop takes. These photos are what shape a teenager's actual day: the commute, the hangout spots, the small stuff that follows a kid to school whether anyone notices it or not.

I want someone looking at this to stop thinking of the neighborhood as just scenery and start thinking about it as somebody's actual daily routine. I want a teacher to ask themselves what their students are really walking through every day instead of assuming. The eviction notice sitting right next to the Knicks banner and the gnome garden is on purpose, that's what neighborhoods all across NYC is about, good stuff and hard stuff at the same time.

Cartographers Statement

I picked Glendale because I already knew it before I ever mapped it. I drove through here for years visiting my now-wife's family before we ever lived here, coming off the Jackie Robinson Parkway ramp past Dry Harbor Playground into the side streets. By the time I started this atlas I wasn't mapping a stranger's neighborhood, I was mapping the place I was already becoming a local in.

My process went data first, then sound, then two different kinds of walking, then a freehand drawing last, once I had everything else to reflect against. I pulled school data off data.nysed.gov for the Data-Driven Map. I recorded two ten-minute soundscapes at different spots in the neighborhood for the Soundscape Map. I did a GPS-tracked walk for the STEAM Classroom Map and a separate photo walk for the Youth-Focused Map. I drew the freehand map last, once the rest of the maps had already told me what I actually noticed about this place.

Urban: Rothstein's piece pushed back hard on the idea that segregation in a neighborhood like this just happened on its own. He writes that "residential segregation was in large part created, enforced, and sustained by a network of racially explicit and unconstitutional federal, state, and local government policies, not by private choices about where people wanted to live" (Rothstein, 2019, p. 37). Walking this block for the STEAM and Youth maps, that history is still visible in the present tense. Signage was bilingual or trilingual almost everywhere I looked, the Myanmar Baptist Church sign in Burmese and English, a recycling sticker in Spanish and English. This neighborhood didn't get this mixed by accident, and it didn't get this segregated by accident either.

Education: The Data-Driven Map showed real gaps between the elementary schools zoned here and Grover Cleveland, the zoned high school just over the line in Ridgewood. Proficiency numbers dropped as kids got older, and Science scores only existed for the schools old enough to give that exam. The neighborhood doesn't have one school experience, it has several different ones depending on which block a kid is zoned to.

Adolescent: Coleman writes that "the more enriching the environment, and the wider range of activities the young person is engaged in, the more opportunities there will be for the prefrontal cortex to mature faster" (Coleman, 2021, p. 18). A teenager on this block isn't reading it as infrastructure. They're reading it as where the bus actually stops, which dead end street is quiet enough to hang out on, whose porch has the Knicks flag up. That same block also has an eviction notice taped to a gate. Both of those things are the environment a kid here is actually growing up in, not just the parts that look good in a photo.

City: Conley writes that "city artifacts such as a bus or stop sign are infused with meaning about a person's sense of place" and that "these artifacts can be read as spatial texts" (Conley, "Urban Settings," The SAGE Encyclopedia of Out-of-School Learning). The STEAM Classroom Map is built entirely on that idea, a bus stop against a cemetery fence, a staircase over a highway instead of a crosswalk, infrastructure that becomes a lesson the second you ask why it's built that way. Giroux argues that any institution, school or otherwise, represents "a particular selection and exclusion from the wider culture" rather than passing on knowledge objectively (Giroux, 2011, p. 236). That's exactly what's happening when I choose which why questions to chase on a walk and which pieces of infrastructure I even bother to notice. I'm deciding, the same way a curriculum does, what counts as worth learning and what gets left out.

Looking at all five maps side by side, this neighborhood doesn't tell one clean story, it tells several at once and they don't always agree. The Data-Driven Map is cold numbers that show real inequality baked into which school a kid gets zoned to. The Soundscape Map is the neighborhood you only notice if you stop and actually listen instead of just looking. The STEAM Classroom Map treats the block as a text you can read and question. The Youth-Focused Map treats the same block as somebody's actual daily routine, commute and hangout spots and all. My freehand map, "Becoming a Local," is the most personal one, a single route that turned a visitor into somebody who belongs here. None of that cancels out the rest. Glendale is a place people are actively becoming local in, actively getting priced out of, actively raising kids in, all at the same time, and I don't think the job is to resolve that into one tidy conclusion. The job is to notice all of it.

Works Cited

Coleman, J. (2021). Ten things every teacher needs to know about the teenage brain. In The teacher and the teenage brain (pp. 1–19). Routledge.

Coggin, L. S. (n.d.). Rural settings. In The SAGE encyclopedia of out-of-school learning.

Conley, T. L. (n.d.). Urban settings. In The SAGE encyclopedia of out-of-school learning.

Giroux, H. A. (2011). Teachers as transformative intellectuals. In E. Blair & H. Eleanor (Eds.), Thinking about schools: A foundations of education reader (pp. 233–241). Taylor & Francis Group.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that's just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159–165.

Rothstein, R. (2019, February). The myth of de facto segregation. Kappan, 100(5), 35–38.

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