Explorer tidying up county map

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Jud Engels went looking for the Birmingham Branch Library last week at the spot shown in the last edition of the Lucas County Highway Map Atlas.

It wasn’t there.

But from that spot, Mr. Engels could see where the library really stood: one block to the east and on the opposite side of Paine Street.

Rest assured that the county map’s next edition, to be published next month, will show the Birmingham library’s true location.

“There’s just no substitute for seeing what’s actually there,” said Mr. Engels, a cartographer and proprietor of Engels Guide Inc., a Fort Thomas, Ky., firm whose business includes creating maps for governments and public agencies.

Mr. Engels’ four-person shop is in the midst of creating the third edition of the Lucas County map and atlas, and Mr. Engels has been out and about fact-checking.

It’s not the only resource County Engineer Keith Earley has called upon to update the map, last published in 2008 after an extensive overhaul and redesign in 2006.

In March his office held Map Day, and government and agency officials were invited to propose changes and corrections. The following month, some of those familiar with the county visited the office to review a proof version.

The county engineer also makes notes of corrections that map-readers call in between editions.

But some changes simply never get reported, and to find those missing factual links, Mr. Earley’s office relies on Mr. Engels to do a little old-fashioned looking around.

One morning last week, that mission took him to East Toledo and Oregon, where he confirmed or corrected, as each case presented itself, the locations of parks, post offices, schools, firehouses, and other landmarks shown in the 2008 atlas.

“Some of the parks are well marked, but others are just a grassy strip. Those are the questions I bring to their [the county engineer’s office’s] attention,” Mr. Engels said. “If we’ve got it labeled with a name, I like to go check it.”

And yes, that includes libraries.Not only was the Birmingham library in the wrong spot, the county map’s previous edition didn’t reflect the 2007 relocation of the Locke Branch Library, also in East Toledo, from Main Street to a new building at 703 Miami St.

But the Birmingham branch has been at the same spot since 1925, said Rhonda Sewell, spokesman for the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. “Apparently nobody noticed” that the library locations in the atlas were wrong, she said. “I think it’s fascinating.”

Said Julie McCann, director of the Birmingham library, “No one had ever mentioned that to me. “I’m glad it’s going to be fixed, because we want to be found.”

The Birmingham library location is one of 147,697 facts represented in the county map, so checking everything for each edition is impractical.

Three years ago, Mr. Engels said, places of interest were plotted by entering their addresses into computer mapping software. Field-checking for that edition was focused on confirming the minute details of metro Toledo’s street network, notably weeding out “paper streets” that had been platted but never built. The computer was trusted for building locations, and as it turned out, that trust wasn’t always warranted.

Joe Shultz, the tax-map supervisor at the county engineer’s office, said the highest priority in drafting the county map was ensuring the road information was correct.

“The base map carries through over the years. It just keeps getting better and better with each edition,” Mr. Shultz said.

Computer addressing also was relied upon to plot the locations of schools, but based on Mr. Engels’ field work, at least some of that information was outdated even three years ago.

Driving along Sixth Street, Mr. Engels found that the St. Louis School identified on the map had long since become St. Louis Outreach Center, no longer a place of education.

A few blocks away, it was also evident that Franklin School, shown in the 2008 atlas, was no longer used as such: no school zone posted on the streets, few cars in the parking lot, and no flag on the flagpole. Toledo Public Schools had closed it in 2005, and later leased the building as a Head Start facility. But the county engineer’s office neither noticed nor was told about those developments.

There was no flag on the flagpole at Wynn Elementary School in Oregon, either, but Mr. Engels deduced from the full parking lot, well-kept lawns, and children on the playground that Wynn was still very much still an operating school.

Nearby, Mr. Engels checked to see if several Eagles’ Landing golf-course subdivision roads depicted on the 2008 map as “proposed” had been built since then; they hadn’t. Mr. Engels also confirmed the locations of the post office and village hall in Harbor View, the latter requiring a second pass by the two facilities’ shared building because the only clue to the signless village hall’s existence was a glassed-in bulletin board displaying meeting notices.

Closer to downtown Toledo, Mr. Engels updated the map’s depiction of the Marina District to reflect that Riverside Drive had been built, noted the creation of Tribute Park near the Veterans’ Glass City Skyway and the nearby presence of Toledo Skyway Marina, and added the name Boers-Boyer Way to the road that winds through International Park, now that signs with that name have been erected.

For this work, along with the actual updating of the map’s database before it is sent to a printer, Mr. Engels’ firm will receive $24,000 from Lucas County.

“I have the perfect job,” said Mr. Engels, who professed putting 55,000 miles on his hybrid sedan’s odometer last year. “I like to go exploring. To me, it’s fun.”

Mr. Shultz said the new county maps should be published by mid-June.

The county will have 25,000 atlas books and 25,000 fold-up maps printed, he said, with each county resident allowed up to two copies at no charge.

Additional copies will be priced $2, which also will be the charge to buyers who are not Lucas County residents. An online version will be available on the county engineer’s page on the Lucas County Web site.

Engels Guide has worked on many county maps throughout Ohio, including those of Wood, Henry, and Hancock counties.

“They’re all different,” Mr. Engels said. “Every county engineer likes to do it a little differently.”

Contact David Patch at: dpatch@theblade.com or 419-724-6094.