By Alex Slen
Past the colorful Bitmojis that dot the Snapmap of my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, there is a curious marker. Written in a simple white font are the words “Acme Heights.” On its own, it’s unremarkable. Snapchat does this for every neighborhood in the country. The only problem: if they’re not on Snapchat, even longtime residents of St. Louis would not know Acme Heights exists.
In the early part of the twentieth century, Acme Heights did exist on physical maps. Early twentieth-century maps show that along Acme Avenue, there was a neighborhood called Acme Heights, spanning just two blocks wide and five blocks long. Located in the Northeast part of Jennings, one of the 90+ municipalities in St. Louis County—Acme Heights was just another neighborhood. Today, Acme Avenue is lined with small shotgun-style homes situated between a Dollar General, next to burnt-out, vacant buildings, and a handful of larger older homes. A small strip you pass by. Not a community. Certainly not a neighborhood worth labeling.
There was never a reason for me to go to that part of town. It was far from anywhere I frequented, not exactly the safest, and rather destitute. Acme Avenue is just another part of the greater St. Louis post-industrial story.
North St. Louis County used to be a thriving industrial hub, a vision of modern American success during the Second World War. Once the war ended, however, Jennings began to decline. This was coupled with the rise of suburban white flight, redlining, and poor urban planning. Today, that area remains one of the poorest areas in the region, with a median household income of $29,237 and 30% of the town under the poverty threshold. This area would never have been on my radar without Snapchat.
Social media tends to get a bad rap. In some cases, this bad reputation is merited. Increased cell phone usage has been linked to increased rates of depression, extremism, and isolation. However, the media tends to focus solely on the negative aspects of social media platforms and ignore the powerful positive effects technology can have. My view on social media only recently changed and this epiphany came from one of the most unusual places on the internet: Snapmaps, and their window into neighborhoods like Acme Heights. These are shadow blocks—neighborhoods that don’t exist in the local vernacular, but by some AI-generated anomaly, have been reified in the virtual world.
In the early 20th century, there was a similar phenomenon: paper towns.
On a map, you might mistake Agloe for any of the small hamlets in rural upstate New York. But it existed on a map before it ever existed in real life. Back in the 1920s, map makers had an interesting dilemma: if all maps were more or less the same, how could one protect their intellectual property and prevent other mapmakers from plagiarizing their work? To combat this, General Drafting founder Otto G. Lindberg and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, picked a random spot where two dirt roads met in upstate New York, and combined their initials. An unpopulated spot now had a name: Agloe.
What they didn’t expect was for that name to come to life. Years later, while looking at a map made by a competing company, Linberg and Alpers saw a town where the same two dirt roads intersected, also named Agloe. They confronted them, explaining that Agloe was an imaginary town created to catch plagiarism, and threatened to sue them for copyright infringement. The other map maker responded that a town did in fact exist at the intersection of the two dirt roads; over the years, enough people had seen Agloe on Alpers’ and Lindberg’s map that a once-random intersection had taken on a life of its own. Just by putting the name on paper, they had inadvertently forged a new town.
The East Cut neighborhood in San Francisco is another example of this phenomenon. The East Cut was founded by a group of San Francisco residents who created The East Cut Community Benefit District (CBD) in 2015. Until 2015, The East Cut was completely unknown to many in San Francisco. Its name was too obscure, the geographic location overlapped with edges of existing neighborhoods, and most importantly, it wasn’t on the map.
It grew out of what was once Rincon Hill, once one of San Francisco’s most fashionable neighborhoods, until it was cut down the middle to facilitate commerce, creating the Second Street Cut. As the area became industrialized, the rich moved away. Rincon Hill was further flattened by a 1906 earthquake. When the city began rebuilding, Rincon Hill became a warehouse district. But beginning in 1989, developers saw the potential for it to transform back into a residential neighborhood.
The revamp was not without controversy. In the New York Times, software developer Menotti Minutillo noted that The East Cut sounded like a “$17 sandwich.”
“It’s degrading to the reputation of our area,″ said Tad Bogdan, a fourteen-year resident of the neighborhood, in an interview with the Times. In a survey of 271 neighbors that he organized recently, he said, 90% disliked the name.
Andrew Robinson, Executive Director of The East Cut CBD, notes that, seven years after its renaming in 2015, the community has embraced the area—and its name.
“It’s very readily adopted now by people as the neighborhood they live in because it is advertised as a place where people want to rent an apartment or to sell something in,” he says.
Its recognition initially came from the 21st century’s arbiter of location, Google Maps, through a community-led process to get the community on the map—literally. The East Cut CBD petitioned Google Maps to include the new neighborhood on the map. They were helped by an East Cut board member, who was also an employee at Google’s San Francisco office, which is coincidentally in the East Cut CBD.
Through digital recognition, East Cut was born.
Unlike other parts of San Francisco that faced problems due to COVID-19, The East Cut re-emerged stronger than ever. The East Cut contains some of San Francisco’s largest tech companies as well as residential and retail units. Robinson credits the neighborhood’s relative success to this diversity.
“In the downtown area, we are fortunate to have a diverse set of buildings to create a greater, more resilient future,” he says. Beyond that, the East Cut CBD provides resources that other neighborhoods can not. They pay for street cleaners, organize community activities, provide public wifi, and host events. Businesses and residents who live within the district are entitled to all of the services and benefits that the CBD provides, while those who fall outside of the arbitrarily drawn lines go without.
Those lines, decided by property owners who wanted to pay into the district, can be a little unusual. “It’s an odd thing because our western edge goes to Second Street and on the other side of Second Street is the Yerba Buena community benefit district. That does feel arbitrary because it’s like ‘oh, no, we only clean here. [That’s] a problem for the other side,’” says Robinson.
It’s not just the East Cut that has issues setting neighborhood boundaries.
“Defining neighborhoods is sort of an evergreen topic within urban geography. Because if you ask 100 people to draw boundaries around the neighborhoods where they’re living, it’s all gonna look a little different,” says Matthew Zook, professor of geography at the University of Kentucky.
Neighborhoods are interesting phenomena in geography because unlike other geographical features, they are defined by people.
“The way humans use space is constantly changing too. So, it’s always going to be changing and dynamic,” said Zook. “Depending on who you are, based on your age, your race, your gender, the way you interact is different.”
In her book Mobile Mapping: Space, Cartography and the Digital, Clancy Wilmott, Professor of Geography at the University of California Berkeley says, “It [mapping] is a practice of drawing relations together in and through movement.” Forming a neighborhood is a living process.
Mapping neighborhoods is, perhaps, the best example of taking something inanimate and infusing it with life. While physical reality provides the basis for maps, the maps we make have similar power to alter the world they depict. Just as the town of Agloe appeared because two men put a dot where two dirt roads intersected, or how a group of stakeholders came together to form a more perfect San Francisco neighborhood, or how Snapchat put a label on a small block and created a neighborhood only its users could see.
On any given day, tens of thousands of young people see Acme Heights in some form, whether it be through Snapmaps, geotags on posts, or public stories. However, even those who see the name daily don’t always notice it.
“I’ve seen it, but I don’t know anything about it,” said Kipp Vitsky, a high school senior in St. Louis.
JiaLi Deck, another high school senior, hadn’t heard of it at all.
Vitsky’s and Deck’s sentiment is unsurprising. Acme Heights is by no means an attention-grabbing name. But that’s not the point. Acme Heights was a mistake, and not even a very rare one. There are likely thousands of instances of mistakes like this happening, as a product of AI assigning names to places that might get traffic or have historical roots, but aren’t defined neighborhoods in practice. In the case of Snapmaps, users can also suggest locations, meaning that an inside joke or a place with meaning to only a handful of people can be enshrined on a map visible to the whole world. As maps become increasingly algorithm-based or rely on user data, the appearance of these shadow blocks will likely only continue.
“There’s not a good way of holding Snap or Google Maps or any of these other sort of algorithmic mapmakers responsible for what they’re serving up,” said Zook.
Nonetheless, these platforms change the way people interact with the world. People now have access to an accurate map of every place on earth. Every time we open Google Maps we are a figure on the map, and we are involved in the mapmaking in real-time. Whether Google uses location data to calculate traffic stop times, Apple solicits user reviews for restaurants and hotels, or Snapchat takes stories and posts them on their map, we contribute to the digital maps that now shape our world. Together each of us has shared ownership, a shared connection, delighting in the benefits and conveniences, connecting with the mistakes.
St. Louis is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Any good urban planning class will, inevitably, bring up one of our city’s most famous failures—the Delmar Divide. The divide began on a map—not unlike the one that created Acme Heights, Agloe, or The East Cut. It was a simple line, drawn with red ink, along Delmar Boulevard that separated where banks would give loans and where they would not. The area south of the line prospered and the area just north was left to decay. In some areas, the divide separates neighborhoods where only 10% of individuals have bachelor’s degrees versus 70% just south. It separates million-dollar homes from abandoned houses.
It separates opportunity, dictates health, and has the power to shape people’s future. To be a resident of St. Louis is to be acutely aware of this invisible line and the power of geography. I, for one, never spent too much time north of that line. Even though it’s the same city, one would be forgiven for not knowing it well. If it wasn’t for Snapchat, I would never have heard of Acme Avenue—it’s north of Delmar.
I don’t think of myself as an optimistic person. Technology, however, gives me some hope. Moore’s law stated that computer process powering doubles every two years. In the past 50 years, we have not only seen a computing and processing revolution, we have seen a social and connectedness revolution. We have found a way to connect people from across the world, bridging divides of generations, income, and race, in a way that we never even imagined was possible.
Sometimes this manifests in silly ways, such as a project that was organized in 2014 to create a world sandwich by holding bread at antipodes (the geographical opposite sides of the earth), or more serious ways such as broadcasting live war information to millions of people over platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter. There has never before in human history been a social revolution like the one we are living today. The closest precedent we have was the invention of the printing press whose effects, while violent, led to a more interconnected and knowledgeable world.
The East Cut was able to thrive after the pandemic through technology—running an Instagram, using community management software, and providing a space for tech companies. In St. Louis, I can say no matter how different our backgrounds are, as long as we both know Acme Heights, we are neighbors, we live in and are guardians of our secret neighborhood. We created an accidental community, a simple mistake of thousands of ones and zeros, resulting in just two words written in small, simple white text just next to my fellow Bitmoji neighbors.
The Woodlands 