Chapter Eleven: (Cont._3)

Knowing where you are on the planet has always been important in urban planning. It hasn’t been easy. By 1971, we knew about where we were due to the efforts of two land surveyors, Prospect Robbins and Joseph Brown, who set out in October, 1815, to survey the land acquired by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase.

What motivated this? The federal government chose to award land grants to veterans of the War of 1812 and needed appropriate descriptions for the allocations. In fact, I write this from a farm that was part of a grant awarded by President James Monroe to one Grady Thomas, formerly a private in Jones’s Company of the 24^th Regiment of Infantry.

Most veterans sold their grants to settlers moving west. There is no record that Grady Thomas ever emigrated to what is now the State of Arkansas.

But I digress. Let us just say that the surveying was an arduous undertaking, one commemorated to this day by a state park. When I started work, the survey information, along with more modern data, chief of which were topographic elevations, were available on individual sheets that we simply called “topo maps.”

These sheets only covered 60 square miles or so. To use them, the process involved getting into a car, driving to Roosevelt Road in Little Rock, purchasing the map(s) from the United States Geologic Survey) bringing them back, and usually trimming and taping several together. If you were close friends with a photographer, as I was, you could draw a very thin line on the original and have the map enlarged so that the line was a specific length that would produce a traceable result at a workable scale, sort of.

Later, this would all involve a dozen or so keyboard strikes.

Information is key to making good decisions for future generations. Pity the society that ever eschews information. It would be like choosing not to breath oxygen. Accordingly, we struggled with topo maps and census tables, often leaving the office at the end of the day with strained eyes and a throbbing head. In the process, we would slowly develop what we hoped would be a logical course of action for our clients.

Sometimes we were more successful than at others, the chief obstacles to success being politics, lack of resources, and the dreaded “Law of Unintended Consequences.”

What’s that? Oh, it is like when the government spends a fortune on a major traffic artery with which to move goods and services and then allows it to be clogged with adjoining commercial enterprises to the point where traffic no longer can move along the artery and another must be built farther out, often with the same results. One major American city had gotten up to eight rings, I think it was, before the whole system toppled over like a Delta thunderhead on a summer afternoon.

Evenings after struggling all day with facts, figures, and maps, it was nice to return to my simple apartment and enjoy the benefits of having a friend like Jackie, from over on Riverside Drive where they didn’t worry a lot about the future.

Where the survey started