That tourist map of Chicago I found at a gas station somehow had Lake Michigan on the wrong side

I was on a call near the lakefront last summer and stopped for coffee... grabbed one of those free city maps by the register. The cartographer put Lake Michigan on the west side of the city, so the whole shoreline was flipped like a mirror image. Me and my crew spent 10 minutes trying to figure out if we were losing our minds or if they just hired someone who never looked out a window. Has anyone else run into a map that was just fundamentally broken like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

emeryn831d ago

Nah, hold up. I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. Maybe the gas station map was actually drawn from the perspective of someone standing on a boat in the harbor looking west toward the skyline, so the lake would technically be behind them. Or maybe it was one of those old 1800s reproductions where the city grid was different and the shoreline hadn't been filled in yet. Your mileage may vary, but I've seen a few vintage maps that swapped directions because they were tracing from an upside-down surveyor's sketch. Could be the cartographer was just trying to show the lake as a backdrop from a specific viewpoint, not a top-down layout. Worth considering before you write it off as someone who never looked out a window.

riverf341d ago

Wait, what if the map was drawn by a sailor who only knew the lake from offshore?