It might have begun, as many things do, with Robert Moses—or a meme about him, anyway.

“Nice neighborhood you’ve got there,” read the bold-faced all-caps text on a portrait of the infamous city planner. “Sure would be a shame if someone put a highway through it.”

This was in February 2017. Juliet Eldred, at the time a senior at the University of Chicago studying geography, cross-posted the meme into a popular Facebook group she’d made for sharing GIS and mapping humor.

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