Seeking a Town on the Border of Fiction and Reality
SOMEWHERE
NEAR AGLOE, N.Y. — It is one thing to lose your keys or your iPhone,
even the love of your life, but to lose an entire town? Yet that is what
just happened in upstate New York. Last week, Google did something it
almost never does — it wiped a town off its maps.
Don’t blame Google. The town’s provenance was suspect.
How,
Agloe, a speck of a hamlet in the western Catskills, wound up on maps
90 years ago remains a cartographic enigma. How it persevered is an
existential riddle.
“I’ve
never heard of it before,” said Matt Nelson, manager of Beaverkill
Angler in Roscoe, a tiny town within shouting distance of Agloe, at
least on some maps.
Describing
Agloe as a mere hamlet is particularly apt. When it was first
acknowledged, on a free road map distributed by Standard Oil Company of
New York, or Socony, gas stations in 1925, its population was given
indeterminately as from zero to 500, which was probably a peak.
Agloe’s anomaly begins with its name. Is it a-GLOE or AG-loe?
“You can take your choice on how you want to pronounce it,” Roscoe’s official historian, Joyce Conroy, said.
Even the precise location of Agloe has been a conundrum. The Driving Route Planner website
lists its exact geographic coordinates (for the record, latitude
41.964111300, longitude –74.907832100). Complying with those coordinates
would deliver you just beyond Bill and Darlene Beers’s backyard in the
Town of Colchester in Delaware County, barely across the Sullivan County
line from Roscoe.
Following
Google’s slightly vaguer driving directions, before they were deleted
from the web, would still leave you in Sullivan County near a secluded
concrete shaft protruding from the Pepacton Reservoir.
“We
were thinking of putting up a historic sign,” said Elaine Fettig, the
former president of the Roscoe-Rockland Chamber of Commerce, “but where,
exactly, would we put it?”
Last
week, a reporter for The New York Times noticed a mention on Twitter
about fake towns, which mapmakers would invent to guard against
copyright infringement. An Internet search turned up Agloe and the
Google map, complete with the driving directions. Agloe was a mapmaker’s
creation.
“It
wasn’t uncommon for cartographers to put something fictitious so if
they spotted another work with it they knew it was lifted,” said William
Spicer, the president of Maps.com.
Among
those countless copyright traps, Agloe achieved a rare distinction: The
name stuck. As early as the 1930s, a fishing lodge named Agloe opened
nearby (which later helped Rand McNally successfully claim in a lawsuit
that the Agloe on its own map had not been copied from Socony’s).
Agloe
survived on road maps by Esso and Exxon into the late 20th century and
even long enough to evolve from a so-called paper town into a digital
one on websites like Google, where it made its debut only last year.
It was even mentioned in a 1957 travelogue in The Times
about “scenic drives through the Catskills,” which rhapsodized about
“an unmarked country road that goes north through Rockland and Agloe.”
As
recently as 2008, Agloe gained a modicum of notoriety, and, since then,
an occasional teenage tourist, because it figured in the climax to John
Green’s young adult novel “Paper Towns.” (Last week, Fox 2000 announced
that it would turn the novel into a film.)
A
team of local experts — Mrs. Beers, Mrs. Fettig, Dr. Conroy, and the
historians of Colchester and Delaware County, Kay H. Parisi-Hampel and
Gabrielle Pierce — was asked to dissect Agloe’s pedigree.
What
inspired the name? The original mapmakers, Otto G. Lindberg and Ernest
Alpers of General Drafting Company, scrambled their initials to form it.
Why
did they plant Agloe in upstate New York? According to Mr. Lindberg’s
obituary, he went fishing one day in 1923 and got lost going home. “A
mapmaker by profession,” the article said, “he made up his mind to
provide the public with maps to prevent such situations.”
Any
serious trout fisherman, like Mr. Lindberg, would have eventually found
his way to Roscoe (where there also happened to be a Socony gas
station). In 1930, five years after Mr. Lindberg invented Agloe, Ms.
Beers’s grandfather, the son of an immigrant Irish family that fled the
potato famine and was squeezed by the Depression, sold off a prime
angling spot flanked by the Beaver Kill and Spring Brook. The buyers
called their new venture Agloe Lodge Farms.
How
had life imitated art? “Among the first guests at Agloe,” a local
newspaper explained in 1944 when the lodge was already run down, was “an
official of a map publishing firm, who suggested to the owner that he
‘put the place on the map.’ He did.”
On March 17, though, Google removed it, within hours after The Times inquired about its provenance.
“As
we’ve said in the past, we’re always working on making Google Maps as
useful, accurate and comprehensive as possible,” Susan Cadrecha, a
Google Maps spokeswoman, said. “The inclusion of Agloe is no exception —
stay tuned in the coming months for places as varied as Mos Eisley,
Narnia and the lost city of Carcosa.”
Just
as Google had promised, the 123-mile trip from Manhattan to Agloe took
about two and a half hours. For any latter-day Magellan, though, the
challenge on arrival was proving a negative: that you can’t get here
from there.
Today,
where “here” is supposed to be, Agloe groupies can still find a
surviving barn; a pale yellow former creamery; a tiny wooden hangar that
served a private airport; a reputedly haunted fairy tale castle, which
belongs to the Masonic Order; and, of course, the derelict white frame,
green-trimmed former Agloe fishing lodge near the intersection of Morton
Hill and Rockland Roads.
“I
don’t know anything about it,” said William Ksiazek of Montvale, N.J.,
the lodge’s current owner. “I know it as the Hempel place.”
A weather-beaten screen door still bears the initial “H,” after its former owners.
While
there appears to be no visible legacy of Agloe, it still remains on
some maps — poised, perhaps, as it nears its 100th year, to reappear.
“Is it real?” Mrs. Fettig said. “What’s your definition of real? If it exists in enough minds, it’s real.”
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