If I by chance look and see my reflection, for more than a second our two,

my gaze is directed inward, underneath the initial figure I see.

And without realizing, I am compelled to close my eyes

and deny that which is shown to me

It would be so much easier

to walk through life

studying all the stars in the sky, than to face my own image.

It is only the love of a comrade,

I know,

But after wild loves

And fevered,

It is very good, this love of a comrade.

It will not change.

I shall fail,

And do foolish things;

I shall stumble,

And you will not be ashamed of me;

You will love me still;

You will always care

About what life is doing to me.

There will be no possession in your love,

There will be no beating of pulses;

Only a caring

And a being glad with me,

And sorry, too;

Only a standing by

And a steadying of the hand sometimes.

Love me so,

Comrade.

The request was for around $120,000, dedicated mostly for hardware and software, which was very expensive in 1990. We were requesting two UNIX workstations, a big plotter, and ArcInfo software.

I had learned some GIS in my Masters program and even used a program my professor made for my thesis, doing a land use study for the Town of Ithaca.

Exploratory

My intuition was that the approach of spending six figures on some hardware and software so we could digitize paper maps was not a good investment of money and time. I wanted to do some discovery on who else needs or is using GIS.

My first stop was one floor down in City Hall with the Engineering Department. Creig Hebdon was my counterpart there, the most technical guy and knew something about computers and mapping. It quickly became clear that the Planning Department’s plan was worthless to the engineers. The plan was to use TIGER maps as the base, which were digitized at a scale of 1:100,000. That may be fine in an area where farms and forests are the primary land use, but not a city where they have to manage infrastructure projects with storm water and sanitary sewers.

My phone logs show conversations with dozens of different people, where I called planning departments from cities, counties, NYS departments to find out what GIS they are using.

It became clear to me that the best approach would avoid spending the money on expensive UNIX workstations and ArcInfo software, with its huge learning curve and a full-time job in itself. The high level TIGER file maps are adequate for planning purposes, but it made sense to build a highly accurate base that would satisfy engineering and infrastructure work.

Building the Coalition

The city of Ithaca couldn’t afford high resolution maps, so the only way to get them would be to build the coalition of partners to share the cost. I reached out to the towns around the city, the county, Cornell University Facilities, New York State and some businesses. All were interested, but nobody had the expertise to build high resolution maps of the whole area.

The big break was on May 22, 1991, according to my phone log . I talked with Al Roy from New York State Electric & Gas (NYSEG), our regional energy provider. He told me that they have been in the process of mapping all of central New York. It turns out most of the project was done but they were going into the last phase of the project which included Ithaca and all of Tompkins County.

Al said that Tompkins County was mostly rural, and Ithaca didn’t quite meet the threshold in population to justify doing the highest resolution mapping, so it was planned to do high level photography that would create a base good to 5′-10′. That is fine for rural areas, not good for urban areas.

They used a process called photogrammetric mapping, where digital maps are made from aerial photographs, and control points in the ground to tie in the location by creating a model. The lower the flight for the photographs, and the more control points there are, will result with higher resolution and precision of the digital maps, and of course the cost.

Al Roy suggested I speak with Bob Green at New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT). In the end, NYS didn’t have anything budgeted to be part of the partnership, but they would share some control points they had around the county.

In the end there were three flights to map out the county, the highest would be to map the whole county, the middle to map the Town of Ithaca (which includes much of Cornell), and the lowest to map the city. For the county, there were 10 flight lines and 203 photographs. For the town, 10 flight lines and 165 photos, and the city had 11 flight lines and 237 photos.

A working coalition to set controls

The coalition wasn’t just sharing the budget, it included actual field work. To get the accuracy of the mapping process, we needed 192 control points spread throughout the county, clustered more tightly in the urbanized area. There were some existing monuments, and NYSDOT were laying some more, but we need to 140 new ones. In the end NYSEG, Tompkins County, Town, Cornell and City crews worked together to accomplish this feat. This in-kind work for the project was used as each partner’s contribution to the project, which ultimately was NYSEG’s.

Buying the Hardware

I decided to get PCs for the mapping stations instead of $30,000 Unix workstations. We ended up building a 486-33 with a 1.2 gig hard drive and 8 megs ram. The other PCs in the office had 40 megs, so 1,200 was a massive increase. Most people didn’t know what a gigabyte was, but we needed all of that space for the maps. All this for $7,000, a large figure by today’s standards, but less than a quarter the price of a UNIX workstation.

Transforming maps to GIS

When we got the maps, it was pretty overwhelming. There were hundreds of files, each part of a tile system which were chopped up with all the layers (street curbs, manholes, trees, buildings, etc.) identified. This is a great structure for engineers who are working on a small area for an infrastructure project, but planners work in the opposite direction, working at the layer level holistically. What I had to do to transform these highly accurate maps into a GIS, was to create a city-wide layer. I had to combine all the 200+ files for each layer for the whole city.

As it turns out, the City started a capital project to upgrade City Hall, with new HVAC, windows, etc. All staff had to work from home, basically. This is pretty amazing in the early 1990s in hindsight of COVID. I took my $7k PC workstation to my apartment and worked from there. This gave me the breathing space to spend the time learning Microstation scripting language and building scripts for the ETL process to transform the 200+ files into a series of city-wide layers for buildings, street curbs, manholes, driveways, trees, etc. We happened to be in a sweet spot of the current technology (486 with Gig+ hard drives) being able to handle this processing power. It took hours to run each routine, but I was home and I could run one at 10pm and wake up in the morning and it would be done.

In the end I did break out each layer to a city-wide scope and we have the base of a true GIS, that was accurate to 3″-5″ for detailed features like curbs, trees, fire hydrants, manholes, etc. This wasn’t even conceivable with the original concept using TIGER files.

Notes from Phone Log

7/3/1991 — Ron Martin with Kucera — about 12 control points second order surveying. Total about $7,500. A worst case scenario would be an additional 15 photo identifiable third order points about 7500 dollars, but the DPW could do that. first order points would double the price approximately. $4000 for the mapping points for the whole city by computer. the planimetric mapping would be (3800 acres) about $35/acre, $133,000. 1″50′ detail with all information. no parking meters, would get trees and shrubbery. Contours would need vertical control, to 2′ accuracy, would be $12,000. we need to consider 2′ or 10′. 2′ would be an additional $20/acre. 1′ contour would be another $10/acre to $60/acre.

I’ve been designing and building databases for many decades now, and I realize I naturally designed and built a database to make our documents searchable.

I started work with the city of Ithaca Planning department in June, 1990, right after graduating from Cornell with a Master Degree in Urban Planning. I wanted to review the plans, studies and all the work done by the department over the years. I quickly realized that it was a mess. In some ways it was fun, like going through your grandmother’s attic and stumbling across gems.

But I realized that with all these useful documents, they had no value if nobody knew they existed, or if they did now about them, were unable to locate them in a pile of stuff.

I wanted to completely organize the documents. I asked my boss, the director of Planning, Matthys van Cort. He was the best of bosses, and completely supported me. The documents were piled in various old map files, and the rolled plans were in cardboard storage containers.

I went through hundreds of maps and plans, threw maybe half out, and then categorized them. I came up with a system that would identify the type of document it was, the location it referred to, the medium, the size, and where it was stored. It looked like A/F/C/F07/233. You’d know that it was located in flat file drawer 7, and was a 24″x36″ land use map of downtown on sepia.

I logged everything in a FoxPro database, later to migrate to Microsoft Access. You could look up all land use maps, or plans for a certain neighborhood.

Making them can be surprisingly easy and fast, with just a few substances.

Using glass spray bottles is better. I’m not sure if the plastics

Near the end of my stay, we went to catch some fish for measurement (and eat some of them). We finished with the first pond and went to the second. When we pulled up the net, there were no fish, which was perplexing. So we took a second pass and were extra careful to drag the net so no fish would escape.

At the other end I reached into the water to make sure I kept the bottom of the net on the ground so nothing could slip away. As I pulled the net up something big was slashing around, right where my hand was. It was a crocodile.

I was thankful it didn’t bite my hand when I was reaching for the net to pull it out of the water.

We couldn’t just let it go, because it would probably go into the other two ponds and wipe out the fish populations. And if it decided to stay local, it would just keeping growing and getting more dangerous. We called on Pancho and Miguel who helped maintain the farm. They said that the nose is super sensitive and if you hit it hard, it will kill the croc. I was skeptical but it turns out to be true.

Sarah was an excellent cook so we all enjoyed crocodile tail marinated in lemon, pepper, cloves, cinnamon, salt and coriander and fried in olive oil and garlic. We also enjoyed crocodile and cassava soup.

He had an incredible zest for life, and loved to yarn a tale. He spoke with a twinkle in his eye, but also about very serious issues about government programs and social issues.

I remember walking into town with him, which is a two hour trek, and I have my rubber boots and sinking into the mud to my knees, and he is wearing tennis shoes and hopping along without getting his shoes dirty. It seemed impossible.

P55 from my diary –

Matute had me laughing in Laureles yesterday. El me dijo un chile que no se si es verdad o no. El se fue para 96 a coger el bus para Limon, pero no lo alzanzo. Un amigo en carro, lo llevo hasta BriBri. El estaba fuere del comino a punto de orinar cuando paso el bus. El dejo su trabajo y lo monto. Despues de un rato, el pidio al tiquetero si el puede dejar un ratico a orinar. El le dijo que no. Entonces Matute saco su mazorca y empezo a orinar en el bus. Ahora paran el bus si hay alguien necesita orinar.

Matute was from Honduras. It was common in Talamanca to have people from other countries because this was an area for homesteading, where people could work land for 10 years and then claim title, so people came to the area to make a new life for themselves.

Matute had another family in Honduras, so he went back and forth between families. This was shocking to me at the time, but this is not uncommon in the area.

I lived and worked on the farm at Las Lomas in Talamanca, Costa Rica for four months. It was a transforming experience for me. I was so happy, living with no electricity, running water or conveniences.

We had most the food we needed on the farm (see Cornucopia), but needed to supplement what we could grow on the property with rice, eggs and other necessities, and some non-necessities like a cold soda. That involved “going into town”.

Getting to the farm could only be done on foot, and it would range from one to three hours, depending on how wet the trail was. If it was dry, you could walk more or less normally and it took a little more than an hour. If it was wet, which it often was, you may be sinking up to you knees with every step, and it would take two to three hours.

The closest town is on a single, dirt road, that goes north/south from the southern border town Sixaola with Panama. The first significant town to the north is Bribri. In-between are a few groupings of buildings which don’t even have a name, but are numbered. The closest town for us once we got to the road was 96.

The towns along the road have a big draw to us on the farm: electricity. Having no refrigeration isn’t a big deal when there is food all around, but I still remember how good it felt to drink a cold soda when we were in town. Living in the tropics had a lot of wonderful qualities, but the sensation of a cool drink becomes a fantasy.

P19 – We went to Sixaola, bought screening, nails and food. The path was pretty good; it only took us two hours to get to 96.

Most of the food we ate came from the farm. Once a week we would walk a couple hours into town (see Where do they Shop?) to get rice, eggs, and other provisions.

Right outside the cabin were “pipa” trees, which with bundles of fresh coconut water for the taking. You just need to cut it open with your machete, which we had on us at all times.

from the diary:

Today Indo and I finished making the cacao dryer. He brought a grinder so we can make chocolate. We got breadfruit and palm heart for food. Indo climbed the breadfruit tree. I made empanadas.

When I get home I won’t be able to pick lemon grass and ginger to make tea. Or go out and cut a palm tree to get the heart, or get carambola, biriba, mamonchino…

Another thing on the farm were cacao trees. Indo came to replace me, and he actually brought a hand grinder. Our first use for it was to make chocolate. We picked the cacao, dried in in makeshift driers for a few days, and then ground it up and ate it straight. It was very rich because we didn’t extract the cacao butter.