...and speaking of random tangents
2007.03.28 13:05

10:43 EST Some sort of hawk or eagle gliding over Quondam Ury.
Remember to look for any references to John James Audubon in Miers Fisher's 1804 journal.

Coincidental reading this morning: "Female separatists want to destroy the social contract between men and women and replace it with nothing; they seem to believe that all penetrative sex is rape, if a wife loves her husband she's exhibiting a slave mentality. How do you cope with that sort of fanaticism? Satire seems one way."
--J.G. Ballard, KGB (1995).

So it turns out that Miers Fisher did know William Penn IV--a great grandson of Philadelphia founder William Penn. All I know so far though is that Miers shared a coach with Penn and his wife between Doylestown and Abington mid 1812. Perhaps a great-grandson or two of founder William Penn were once at Ury after all.

Finished digitizing a 1839 map of what is now Northeast Philadelphia. There are more 'Indian' trails around here than I prevously thought, and I hadn't realized before that Indian trail-Oxford Ave is a fairly consistant exact north-south trajectory. And Cottman Ave. and Castor Ave. correspond directly to lines on the 1687 map of Pennsylvania--their orthagonal intersection even makes a kind of cardo and decumanus. There's an aerial view of Cottman and Castor in Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, p. 780 toward the upper left, Bustleton Avenue along the botton of the page is an old Indian trail.

Once you study them, you find that the "Indian" trails within Philadelphia are not random tangents at all. Certainly not as random as the lines on the 1687 map of Pennsylvania. (Cottman Ave. is the parallel line to the left of the planned Susquehanna Road.)



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2011.10.29
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