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The Audubon Partnership for Economic Development is selling their "Off the Map" t-shirts at their office on Post Avenue and in stores throughout Inwood.
Call it a protest. Call it a jab at the rest of Manhattan. Call it pride in the neighborhood. Call it the latest neighborhood t-shirt to hit Northern Manhattan.
The Audubon Partnership for Economic Development is selling “Off the Map” t-shirts – black shirts emblazoned with the outline of Manhattan. But the island is broken by the words “Off the Map” showing Northern Manhattan snipped off the top.
The t-shirts are meant to call attention to the fact that Northern Manhattan is ignored by the rest of the island.
“We don’t appear on any tourist maps. I thought we should call some attention to that,” said APED Executive Director Carmen Diaz.
Diaz said she’s never gotten a satisfactory answer to the question why, so often, Northern Manhattan is not included on tourist maps, or on the map on the back of the seats in yellow taxi cabs.
“We don’t fit,” she said. “We’ve asked and they say we don’t fit.”
Diaz has ordered 500 of the shirts, which are the work of Northern Manhattan artist and designer Tony Peralta.
“I wanted something that showed the separation between the tip of Manhattan and the rest of it,” Diaz said. “He actually captured what I was thinking of.”
On the shirts the word “Manhattan” is crammed in the space below Harlem, and the words “Washington Heights” and “Inwood” are crammed above it.
“There’s lots to see in the Heights,” she said, listing everything from the Dyckman Farmhouse in Inwood to the Hispanic Society at W. 155th Street.
“The [George Washington Bridge] is the most traveled bridge in the world and it’s not on the map,” she said. “I wonder how people get to the Cloisters.”
Being left off the map hurts the neighborhood, Diaz said.
“People are still thinking of Washington Heights and Inwood as having the reputation we had in the 80s Not being on the map doesn’t help.”
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