Map Not To Scale? No Kiddin'

I wanted to do a post about this many moons ago, but simply forgot.

I know NYC taxi maps are not drawn to scale, but there's a difference between "not drawn to scale" and utterly distorted. The next time you're in a NYC cab, check out the sticker on the back seat with the map on it.

Check out the distance between, say, 79th Street and 86th Street. Compare that distance with, say, that between 86th Street and 125th Street. Interesting, huh? Apparently, the size of the blocks shrinks dramatically when one ventures north of 86th Street. In real life, however, that's definitely not the case.

This wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that the Upper East Side and Upper West Side are where well-to-do, predominantly white families tend to live, whereas Spanish Harlem and Harlem tend to be dominated by minorities, would it? Still, this is an improvement over the previous version of the map, which cut Manhattan off at 86th Street on its top edge, implying that there's nothing worth visiting north of Yorkville. The newer version of the map shows the Apollo Theatre and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which didn't exist on the previous version.