The Allure of Street Maps: The Streets of Taipei, Webb Chapel Road, and US Highway 75

Recently I bought an old street map of Taipei dating from the late 1960s. Since I knew that Taipei had been built up a lot over the past few decades, I was curious about which roads had been built back then, and which areas were still completely undeveloped. A few changes I knew about, as they happened after I first came to Taiwan or not long before, but others were new to me. Among other things, I found that several of the districts in Taipei have had their names changed in the intervening time. For instance, the district now officially known as Wanhua (萬華) was once called Longshandistrict (龍山區), after the famous old temple at the center of the settlement originally known in Hoklo as Bangka (艋舺). The district now known as Zhongzheng (中正區), after the name the dictator Chiang Kai-shek gave himself was simply the City Center district (城中區); it was probably renamed after he died, a number of years after this map was published. However, this doesn’t mean Chiang wasn’t shameless enough to have things named after him when he was alive; the road in front of the Presidential Office was known as Jieshou Road (介壽路), which can be translated to “Long live Chiang Kai-shek” (“Jie” is a character in his name, and “shou” means long life), and the road that ran in front of the Taipei train station and then more or less parallel to the railroad running east was called Zhongzheng Road. The part near the train station was later made part of a new east-west thoroughfare then being built named Zhongxiao Road, and the part that angled northwest along the railroad was renamed Bade Road.

Aside from these interesting discoveries, it was also interesting to discover that in blocks to the east that were almost completely undeveloped, there were already a few smaller streets, most of them with more winding or diagonal routes than the big roads that were in the process of being built, or the smaller streets that were built later. Many of these older roads are still in existence, though some of their names have been changed and sections of them are often gone. Several of them still stand out somewhat on today’s maps in comparison to all the other streets with their straight lines and right angles.

Looking at this old street map of Taipei and comparing it to today’s maps also brought to mind my early interest in maps, which dates back as far as I can remember. So today I’m going to reminisce a bit about some of the streets and roads that fascinated me way back then. This sort of thing is really only interesting to geography buffs, and not even many of them will be that interested in my musings, unless they are familiar with the roads in question. So those readers not into geography might want to search the other entries in this blog for something more to their fancy.

I first became interested in maps when I was a preschooler. My mother tells me she drew a map of our living room, I believe it was, for me when I was two or three, which sparked my interest (I rather quickly surpassed her in map reading, as I have a vastly better sense of direction). By the time I started elementary school, I was already in the habit of poring over street maps of Dallas, the city we lived in, and tracing the routes of streets I was familiar with to their ends. I did the same with maps of Texas and even the US. In later years, my interest in maps grew beyond following the routes of individual streets and highways to political and historical maps, but today I want to reflect on that fascination with street maps and with particular roads.

When I first got into street maps, I very quickly picked out favorite streets, roads and highways. While it’s understandable that I would be particularly interested in roads I knew, I would even have a decided preference for one road I knew over another, and come up with various reasons for the superiority of my choice. I had a favorite in each of three categories of roads: small residential streets, larger city streets, and highways. My favorite residential street, not surprisingly, was the one I lived on in preschool and early elementary school, a street called Coral Hills Drive (we moved onto another nearby street when I was nine). This was one of the longest residential streets in our immediate neighborhood, as it looped around the middle of the area. In one or two places, a street crossing it even had a stop sign (usually there were no traffic signs on any of these smaller streets). So there was no doubt in my mind it was the most important street in the neighborhood – all the more so because I lived on it.

Of the larger city streets, my favorite was one called Webb Chapel Road (sometimes written “Webb’s Chapel Road”). I’m not entirely sure why I picked this one over similar roads nearby like Marsh Lane and Forest Lane, but I think it was because when I was about four or five we would sometimes walk a short distance along it to go to the neighborhood supermarket (which went through a number of incarnations, though at first it was an A&P), and also because the church where I went to kindergarten was located on it. Both Webb Chapel Road and Marsh Lane had names that dated back to the 19th century white settlement of Dallas County. Isaac Webb established a church in Farmers Branch, located on what became Webb Chapel Road. Marsh Lane led to the land owned by another early settler, Thomas Marsh. When I was young, Webb Chapel Road was a multilane road down to Royal Lane, just southwest of where we lived. South of there it narrowed to a two-lane road, though it was widened in the subsequent decade or so until by the time I was in high school it was multilane for its entire length. Its northern terminus was in Carrolton at Belt Line Road (another interesting road to trace on a map, as it circled nearly the entire city of Dallas, mostly through the suburbs). Its southern terminus was at the edge of Love Field Airport, just south of Northwest Highway. I would trace the route on our city maps and relish the occasional opportunities to actually go to one or the other of the road’s ends.

My favorite highways were without question Interstate 45 and US Highway 75. They were the highways we followed to go to Galveston to visit my maternal grandfather (who when I was in elementary school moved into an apartment in Dallas – near the southern end of Webb Chapel Road) and to go to Huntsville to visit my paternal grandparents after they moved there from California when I was about five. Interstate 45 was relatively short for an interstate highway; indeed technically it wasn’t one at all, as it didn’t extend outside of Texas. It ran from Dallas to Galveston (I should note that while I’m using the past tense, for most of these roads their routes are still the same today – except in the case of US Highway 75), which is a substantial distance, but not nearly as long as many other interstate highways.

Interstate 45 paralleled the route of the older US Highway 75 and for much of the route they were the same, though Interstate 45 bypassed the centers of most of the towns on the way, while US Highway 75 went through them. While I rarely had the chance to go any distance north on US Highway 75 in person, when tracing it in this direction on US maps I made an interesting discovery. Not only did it run all the way north through Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota to the Canadian border, it actually continued into Canada. Of course in Canada it was not a US Highway, but it kept the same number, extending as Manitoba Highway 75 to Winnipeg. Most other US Highways that reached Canada had a different number designation on the other side of the border. While there may have been other international highways like 75, I didn’t discover any. So once again I was able to feel that I had picked a particularly special road as my favorite in its class.

Sadly US Highway 75 is no longer what it once was. It seems that the part of the highway running south from Dallas was decommissioned, with parts of it becoming Texas State Highway 75, and others being re-designated as parts of other highways. The rest of US Highway 75 is apparently intact, as is Manitoba Highway 75 (though the US-Canada border crossing on the highway was closed a few years ago, so it’s not possible to stay on 75 all the way). But the part that first attracted me to the highway is gone. What’s surprising is that this was done way back in 1987, when I still lived in the US and had even started driving myself (though most of my highway driving in subsequent years was between Dallas and Austin, and so on a different route). If I noticed at the time that US Highway 75 had disappeared south of Dallas, I don’t remember doing so. A few years ago I happened to look up the highway online and found out it had be decommissioned. Of course this is no longer the big deal to me that it would have been when I was five or six, but it’s vaguely disappointing nevertheless.

But things change, whether for the better or not, and it’s still fun to follow the changes. The next thing I need to do is get some street maps of Taipei from the era of Japanese rule; not only do I want to take a close look at the layout of the city then, I’d like to find out what the major roads were called before the KMT came to Taiwan and renamed them all. So nearly four decades after I first started to look at maps, they still fascinate me.