Walk to School, ~’07
A place-based critical making project mapping a route I made nearly every school day in 2007: 9.4 miles each way, on foot, from home on Old Cheney Highway to Howard Middle School in West Orlando. The map overlays annotated locations with historical Google Street View imagery, framing the walk as an archive of working-class West Orlando neighborhoods under development pressure.
View the Annotated Map · View on Google Earth
Reflection
This project began years before this class. I had a practice of sitting for prolonged stretches trying to recall every place I had ever been and plotting them on Google Maps — not for any purpose, just as an exercise in memory. That list now sits at 87 locations across the US and UK, ranging from a Domino’s in Caterham to St. Paul’s Cathedral to a sushi bar off Colonial Drive. This walk map is a direct descendent of that impulse, applied to a single route I made nearly every school day in 2007: 9.4 miles each way, on foot, from home to Howard Middle School. Nearly 19 miles a day, at 13.
The first stage was building the map in Google Earth, which required navigating the geography at street level to confirm or correct memory against what the satellite actually recorded. Several of the locations no longer exist, or barely do. What I found myself doing was less mapmaking than archaeology, with Google’s Street View time machine as the primary archive. The most striking find was an October 2007 image of the Marathon gas station on Colonial — roughly the same month and year I would have been stopping there for Bawls and Doritos on the way to school. The timeline at the bottom of the screen showed the station had been captured as far back as that first Street View sweep, and I could watch the lot change across a decade of thumbnails.
The former home on Old Cheney Highway had a more unsettling temporal arc. The November 2007 Street View shows the tri-plex still standing — cars in the dirt lot, the place apparently occupied. The current view is an empty, grassy lot with a cluster of mailboxes where the structure once was. The building burned down in 2008, months after we moved out. The lot has been cleared. That sequence — structure, fire, erasure — compressed into a thumbnail filmstrip spanning 2007 to 2023 — is not something I expected to have access to.
Salter and Johnson describe Alex Alsup’s “GooBing Detroit” as using historical Google imagery to document neighborhood decline as “a call to interrogate the housing systems in this city and our country” — work that makes “the systemic racism that remains in these policies” visible (96). My route runs through working-class West Orlando neighborhoods that have changed dramatically under development pressure. Most of the “Formerly” annotations mark places gone not from neglect but from the inverse: displacement by development. One location alone cycled from Straub’s Seafood (where my mom worked) to Oblivion Taproom to Roxy Grill within the span of Street View’s archive.
The second stage was building the HTML artifact. I provided location data, descriptions, and the Street View screenshots I had pulled — treating the download as deliberate archival extraction. The resulting HTML file embeds the images directly rather than linking to Google’s servers. This is where Ensmenger’s framing of cloud infrastructure became unexpectedly relevant. He describes the cloud as defined by “seamless invisibility” — the whole point of infrastructure, following Susan Leigh Star, is “that you never really have to worry about what makes it all possible” (43). The images in this map exist because Google has chosen to maintain them. An empty lot in Orlando is currently documented in a server farm somewhere, dependent on that infrastructure remaining intact and accessible. Downloading them, processing them to grayscale, and embedding them in a self-contained file is a small act against that dependency.
The two approaches produced genuinely different objects. Google Earth asked me to navigate a place — to stand at street level in 2007 and look around, to use the time machine to watch a building disappear. The HTML artifact asked me to describe that place to something that had never been there. That gap is worth sitting with. Future versions of this project will include current Street View imagery alongside the historical, without the xerox aesthetic, to make the before/after structure of the gentrification argument more explicit. The map is not finished. The neighborhoods it documents aren’t either.