Brooklyn’s most famous intersections highlighted in minimalist map

Peter Gorman, a Seattle-based artist, has spent the past few years visualizing cities. Through his Etsy shop, Barely Maps, he sells original prints of maps that are spartan in nature, but provide a new way of seeing places.

Perhaps the most successful of these is his series of Intersections maps, which plot out a city’s most iconic or challenging crossings, distilling them into abstract shapes that may be unfamiliar to outsiders, but will almost certainly strike a chord with locals.

Now, Gorman has trained his eye on New York City; specifically, Brooklyn, which—thanks to being outside of Manhattan’s famed grid—has plenty of complex intersections. That includes the flag-shaped interchange at Atlantic and Fourth avenues near the Barclays Center, an “A”-resembling crossing at Church Avenue and Old Utrecht Road close to Green-Wood Cemetery, and the point where Williamsburg and Greenpoint meet at Nassau and Bedford avenues.

According to Gorman, the biggest challenge was designing Grand Army Plaza, a tangle of several streets that’s difficult to navigate no matter what mode of transport you’re using. “Grand Army Plaza is the most complex intersection I’ve done, but I had to include it,” he says.

Courtesy Peter Gorman

Prints of Gorman’s map, along with maps of other cities, including Seattle, Chicago, and Los Angeles, are for sale on the Barely Maps Etsy shop. (He also completed a Manhattan map using only subway stations, if nerdy subway maps are more your thing.)