This week’s best post award goes to the Rooftop of 77 Water Street, New York City. Thanks to ‘Shep’ for telling us about it.
On the top of this building, there is a Bi-plane, complete with landing strip!
Surely a plane couldn’t possibly land on such a small runway? Wouldn’t it be dangerous?
Well, that’s the point. It isn’t a real plane - it’s a full size replica of a Sopwith Camel, a British plane used in the First World War (WWI). The model was designed in the late 60’s and was added to the building to ‘amuse’ residents of other, taller skyscrapers nearby like the WTC.
Have a look on Google for ‘77 Water Street’, or ‘plane on roof New York’ - there is loads about it on the web.
I thought it would be nice to highlight each week the best things that people have added, and then I thought that it might be cool to have a laugh at some of the worse things that have been put on the site. I’ve already started with the first part of this (marker of the week), and this is the first entry of the second part - the worse things.
I’ve had two main problems with this, and surprisingly, it isn’t finding rubbish to talk about - it’s been choosing between the hundreds of poor entries that have been added. And the second problem was thinking of a name. I didn’t want it to be insulting, but I wanted it to make it obvious that I didn’t really think these things were very good. So I’ve ignored the first criteria, and chosen to call this ‘Idiots of the Week’.
The first idiot is this one - What??? Where? How can you see people’s faces and clothes? I don’t understand…
The second idiot is this one - so daft he named it twice…
It’s blurred and uninteresting. That is all there is to say - why he felt the need to add it again I don’t know.
The final idiot is a classic. I think he added this because he had read the blurb on the site about people doing this sort of thing and added this for a laugh. At least I hope so.
Yes. Mexico. In the Atlantic Ocean, just of the African Coast. Actually it’s almost at grid reference 0,0 which is cool, but it isn’t Mexico…
For one thing it could be a little dangerous. Take this for instance - a seemingly innocent post (if a little uninteresting).
The fact is that 99.99% of the readers of this site are not in the least bit interested in the fact that you live at that address, so it will never get accepted onto the main map. On top of that, you need to be VERY worried about the 0.01% of people who would be interested in a stranger’s address. You need to ask yourself why would someone want to know that information? It might be that they are conducting a sociological study on where the users of a small-time google maps website live, in which case I would question their sanity anyway. However, don’t you think that it is more likely that they would have more ’sinister’ motives? Possibly not, but if only one visitor has these motives, it’s not worth the risk.
A quick search on Google for 1325 Esquimalt Road reveals that this is also known as Constance Court, and is a retirement home in Victoria, Canada. It also reveals a telephone number for the building, the names of several residents and the caretaker’s name. The person who added this gave what appeared to be a real name rather than a pseudonym (I won’t reveal what it is for obvious reasons), and cross referencing the two gives a little bit more information than I would be comfortable posting on the web for anyone to see.
By revealing this, I may have excacerbated the risk, but the point is that this person has posted this information without really considering it, and I thought that it was important to bring this to people’s attention to stop them from doing it in future. We get 3 or 4 ‘I live here’ entries added every day and it still amazes me that people would want to divulge that information to the world. It seems to be the standard way of users of this site testing the way new markers get entered. They are lucky that these entries get verified before being added to the site or I’d have to change my domain to mapofstalk.com!
My favourite new entry on the map of strange this week is this one. It’s basically an error with the map. The image has been distorted and it’s made this field appear striped.
This is a really good example of when the joins between two parts of the map goes wrong. It’s not just one of those where there seems to be a shadow, or where the resolution changes. Instead it’s a real example of when things go wrong. Google Maps isn’t perfect, and in some ways it’s these idiosyncracities that make it so interesting.
View this in Google Earth
View the Map