Phillip K. Dick is a favorite author of mine, and his story The Man in the High Castle always made me dream about alternative histories and dark futures. Artist Melissa Gould was obviously reading Dick when she sat down to create Neu-York, an alt-historical map of New York left over from the days when the Nazis conquered the United States.

This four-color lithographic map (which she actually had printed in an edition of 20), is an obsessive exercise in cartography with a “horrifying counterfactual proposition” — she has recreated an accurate map of Manhattan, circa 1939 (with no post-War developments like Lincoln Center), by scanning in several vintage maps and then digitally manipulating them — first erasing all Jewish stars representing synagogues and then removing all the street and location names, replacing them (following my own invented system of naming) with street and location names taken from actual Berlin maps of the same period, ultimately imposing 1939 Berlin on 1939 Manhattan in an historical juxtaposition/overlay. It’s a mash-up of sorts between the two cities.

Some details: the Hudson River is the Havel; the East River the Spree. The Statue of Liberty is the Siegessäule. The Brandenburg Gate stands at Columbus Circle. Tiergarten (Central Park), with the Reichstag (the Metropolitan Museum of Art) stationed at its edge, contains the Wannsee lake. Times Square is Potsdamer Platz; Herald Square is Alexander Platz. Pennsylvania Station is Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Grand Central Terminal is Anhalter Bahnhof; the subways are worked out accordingly.

My German isn’t so good, but there are puns here and there: Spring Street is Frühling (Spring) Strasse — the surrounding streets are therefore called Winter, Sommer and Herbst (Autumn) Strasse. Some name choices are onomatopoetic: Mott Street is Motz Strasse; Mulberry Street is Meyerbeer Strasse. Oh, and Jersey is replaced with Grunwald Forest. I wouldn’t mind seeing that happen in our current reality!