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Tuesday 11am - 5pm Wednesday 1pm - 7pm Thursday 11am - 5pm Friday 11am - 5pm Saturday 11am - 5pm Sunday 1pm - 5pm

Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library

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Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library

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We use maps, geography, and history to understand the connection between people and places in Boston, New England, and beyond. The Norman B.

Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library is a nonprofit organization established as a public-private partnership between the Library and philanthropist Norman Leventhal. Its mission is to use the collection of 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases for the enjoyment and education of all through exhibitions, educational programs, and a website that includes more than 3,700 digitized maps. The map collection is global in scope, dating from the 15th century to the present, with a particular strength in maps and atlases from the New England region, American Revolutionary War period, nautical charts, and world urban centers. The Leventhal Map Center is located on the first floor of the Library’s historic McKim Building in Copley Square. It includes an exhibition gallery that features changing thematic exhibitions, a public learning center with research books, and a reading room for rare map research. Other elements include a world globe three feet in diameter and a Kids Map Club with map puzzles, books and activities. Educational programs for students in grades K to 12 are offered to school groups on site and in the classroom. More than 100 lesson plans based on national standards are available on the website, and professional development programs for teachers are scheduled regularly throughout the year. The Leventhal Map Center is ranked among the top ten in the United States for the size of its collection, the significance of its historic (pre-1900) material, and its advanced digitization program. It is unique among the major collections because it also combines these features with exceptional educational programs to advance geographic literacy among students in grades K to 12 and enhance the teaching of subjects from history to mathematics to language arts. The collection is also the second largest in the country located in a public library, ensuring unlimited access to these invaluable resources for scholars, educators, and the general public.

10/26/2026

Our Where Workshop will be officially opening this Friday, October 30!

Where Workshop is a hands-on discovery lab for geography, history, civics, and more. This new collections-based learning experience opens up questions about geographic inquiry and invites learners into the practice of place-based discovery. Through the prism of maps, primary sources, and visual evidence, you'll learn about continuity and change in the place we call Boston in the past, present, and future—and leave with a perspective that you can bring to bear on the places you care about.

10/23/2026

Urban planners, and transportation planners in particular, have tested all sorts of techniques for modeling how people move through cities. These maps of greater Chicago, with their starbursts of white lines etched against a dark background, exemplify how early computer cartography was seen as a promising technique for processing this kind of data. The maps trace “desire lines”—defined in the study as “the shortest line between origin and destination”—among origin and destination points for three different modes of transportation: the subway-elevated rapid transit system (Figure 18), public buses (Figure 20), and automobiles (Figure 22).

10/21/2026

Created by the Defense Mapping Agency in 1982, this chart forecasts the winding paths that the Challenger space shuttle would follow during an upcoming six-day journey through earth’s orbit.

Challenger’s orbits as part of the mission STS-7 are printed on both the front and back of this map with a unique categorical symbology that draws routes using a series of numbers corresponding to the respective orbit. As part of their work on STS-7, the crew—including Sally Ride, the first American woman to fly in space—deployed a $13 million multispectral scanning satellite called SPAS-01, designed to remotely sense resources on Earth’s surface at a high resolution.

10/20/2026

In this site plan, created by the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) in 1968, color becomes political. Between the late 1950s and early 1970s, the BRA made hundreds of these urban renewal maps for various redevelopment projects in Boston.

These projects were often fraught, as they tended to target lower-income and nonwhite neighborhoods, displacing the people who lived in them. With the right colors, however, urban renewal could look more welcoming—and the company that sold scribe films to the BRA understood this point.

In the promotional booklet shown on the following slides, the drafting company Keuffel & Esser write, “The point is, a multi-color map—imaginatively conceived and skillfully produced—gains a graphic impact important to the selling function. It moves beyond the simple purpose of orientation and becomes a marketing tool.” In this case, the methods of map production can be directly traced to transformative (and even destructive) urban policies.

10/17/2026

Check out this interactive tool by Richard Ellis that shows the network infrastructure of the Southern California Edison Company!

It is part of the Map Chat series commissioned by Richard Pegg, Director and Curator of the MacLean Collection in Illinois and be visited on our website.

10/15/2026

Sneak peek, anyone? 👀🗺️

Where Workshop is almost here, and we couldn’t wait. Swing by the Leventhal Center gallery for public preview days, 10:00 am to 5:00 pm:

📍 Friday, October 16
📍 Saturday, October 17
📍 Friday, October 23
📍 Saturday, October 24

We will officially open and resume regular hours on October 30, 2026.

10/14/2026

This case highlights transitions from the use of analog cartographic drafting tools—such as circular slide rules, lettering guides, curvimeters (used for measuring curves), and precise drafting compasses shown above—towards processes and gadgets that could create, analyze, and visualize geospatial data in a fraction of the time it would take for human hands to do the same tasks.

In the pre-computer period, the most-used tools in a cartographer’s toolbox were ones that helped create precise line widths, exact curves, and standardized shapes or lettering. Today, some of these tools will only be recognizable to many modern cartographers as icons that appear in buttons as part of software used to make maps—a familiar concept to those who recognize the floppy disk as a common icon for the “Save” button in many modern software tools.

10/11/2026

What can maps tell us about a city’s cultural life—and what do they leave out?

For this edition of From the Vault, Jameson Johnson (), founder and executive director of Boston Art Review (), brings together eight objects from the Leventhal Map & Education Center’s collections to explore how Boston’s cultural landscape has been documented, navigated, and imagined over time.

Drawing connections to Boston Art Radar, an initiative mapping the region’s arts and cultural spaces, Johnson examines how maps reveal patterns of investment and development, the conditions that allow cultural spaces to take root and survive, and how decisions about what gets mapped shape public perceptions of a city's cultural life.

This free showing will be held Friday, October 16 in the Leventhal Center gallery with a staff member from the Leventhal Center and Jameson Johnson available to answer questions.

Registration not required, drop by our gallery any time between 2:00 pm and 4:00 pm!

10/10/2026

One of the most famous maps in the Leventhal Center’s collections, this whale chart was created by Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury in 1851 to show the distribution of different whale species and the best seasons for hunting them. Though more than 130 years apart, both this map and Resources on Georges Bank and Nantucket Shoals rely on the convention of a systematic grid and a combination of color and pictorial symbols to create a simple way of encoding geographic observations.

10/08/2026

Did you know Massachusetts is home to the oldest fishing community settled by Europeans in what is now the United States?

This 1831 map of Cape Ann by cartographer John Mason gives insight into a bustling maritime industry that has thrived in the area since early colonial settlements. Prior to the arrival of European colonists, the Pawtucket (or Agawam) people were already making use of the land and ocean for farming and fishing. After learning of the abundant codfish in the waters, the English founded a settlement on the coast of Cape Ann and fishing operations began. In doing so, the colonists targeted the Pawtucket and expropriated their land. The settlement grew and became the town of Gloucester in 1642.

Mason illustrates some of Cape Ann’s heavily wooded areas, which were put to use for ship building and fueled commercial fishing and trading. Other maritime businesses came as a result, and soon Gloucester secured its reputation as a fishing and ship building capital. The peninsula also had a thriving granite industry in the nineteenth century, which drew an influx of immigrants looking to work in the quarries; notice the rocky shorelines.

The land is marked with roads, towns, and other topographical features, but most detail is given to the surrounding waters. The small numbers around harbors and shorelines indicate the water’s depth in fathoms, a nautical unit equaling six feet. Mason added outlines to show obstacles like shoals, sandbars, and rock formations, and marked lighthouses and anchorages. The map includes everything a person might need to navigate, land or sea, revealing the key role maritime activity played in Cape Ann’s history.

Address

700 Boylston Street
Boston, MA
02116

Opening Hours

Tuesday	11am - 5pm
Wednesday	1pm - 7pm
Thursday	11am - 5pm
Friday	11am - 5pm
Saturday	11am - 5pm
Sunday	1pm - 5pm

Telephone

(617) 859-2387

Website

http://www.leventhalmap.org/, https://linktr.ee/bplmaps

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