Look closely at this Google Map. Why is Magnolia Bakery on here like this? I wasn’t searching for it. Has it been given landmark status? If so, I would guess that it commemorates New York’s domestic immigrants, small town girls who come to New York seeking a better life through H&M, Gawker, no-wage internships, and vanilla on vanilla cupcakes. I used to eat that crap for dinner when I worked for CMJ Magazine ($15,000/yr+Metrocard discount).
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Maps are weird. I once drove cross-country to L.A. and mapped out all my gas stops. One stop was Sheffield, Texas which looked like a large city on the map. After getting off the exit, I had to drive 3 miles to get to the actual town which was one intersection, one stop light, a gas station, a post office and a woman on a lawn chair out by a smoker shaped like a bull. Since she was actually running the gas station she asked me to “sit a spell” with her. We had a talk and she offered me some homemade Ambrosia (which tasted just like Baileys…some kind of creamy liqueur not suitable for drinking in the hot Texas sun) and BBQ. Every once in a while a car would drive by and honk. She’d wave and tell me who the person was. I finally asked her why Sheffield was so big on my map. She said, “We paid extra for that so people would stop.” That sounded like absolute bullshit to me, but whatever… As I left she asked me how the young guys where I lived were wearing their hair. “I dunno…sort of long, straight and flat.” She told me that there were 3 young brothers in town that wore their hair “like Billy Ray Cyrus used to… short on top and real long in the back”. Sadly, none of these guys stopped by the gas station where we were on lawn chairs “sitting a spell”. I laughed and thanked her as I left, happy that I actually heard someone say “kinfolk” in real life.