Alice Hudson, Librarian Who Built a Trove of Historic Maps, Dies at 77

She transformed the New York Public Library’s collection of charts and atlases into one of the world’s largest and most accessible resources.

Alice Hudson, who, after selecting in a obligatory geology course in college, took a reroute from her arrange to gotten to be a proficient interpreter and went on to give her career to building one of the world’s chief open outline collections, kicked the bucket on Nov. 6 in Manhattan. She was 77.

Her passing, in a senior living office, was clearly caused by complications of kidney illness, said Robert Trager, her nephew.

Ms. Hudson was chief of the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Outline Division of the Unused York Open Library from 1981 to 2009, managing over what has been called the most intensely utilized open outline room in the world. She supervised the multiplying of the collection, to more than 400,000 maps and 24,000 map books, rivaling the possessions of the Library of Congress, the National Chronicles and the British Library.

She mounted presentations on how geology affected history on the American wilderness and along Unused York City’s shoreline, and enlightened the ignored commitment of ladies to cartography.

“The ladies are there, but truly behind the cloak of social and social imperatives that proceed to this day,” Ms. Hudson said in an address to the Worldwide Cartographic Affiliation in 1995.

“In the world of early maps,” she included, “unsigned colorists, names conceal by initials, dowagers and beneficiaries without their claim names, ladies in cartographic tomes but not in their records — are all misplaced to us unless disclosed by mischance or design.”

Ms. Hudson saw notable maps as windows on the past.

“A outline is so much more than a graph appearing how to get from Point A to Point B,” she told The Unused York Times in 2002. “Every outline tells a story.”

The year some time recently, in another Times meet, she said: “I can keep in mind driving in Westchester once and saying, ‘All of Manhattan utilized to be like this.’ Rooks and rills and brooks and soil streets and gardens and ranches. On the ancient maps you can see, the city is fair a pink triangle. The Bowery was lined with ancient, excellent farms.”

For all the ordinary intelligence that alter is the one steady in Unused York, “sometimes it’s the equality of the city that strikes me,” she included. “There were ethnic neighborhoods early on clustered together in the same places they are now.”

Ms. Hudson cataloged African American verifiable locales uncovered by early Modern York City maps, counting Weeksville, a 19th-century enclave of liberated slaves in the Bedford-Stuyvesant region of Brooklyn, and Seneca Town, a Dark and Irish working-class community in Manhattan, between 81st and 86th Lanes, that was bulldozed to permit the development of Central Park.

Among the collection’s rarities she managed, like vellum-bound Dutch maps of the world from the 1660s, were peculiarities, like maps made of sticks and shells or printed on silk scarves given to troopers in the field.

The library’s maps aren’t only gallery pieces, however.

“People from development destinations will come in and ponder why they’re standing in a lake,” Ms. Hudson said. The reply is that Manhattan has been built on parcels of landfill that stowed away underground streams, lakes and aquifers and that expanded the shoreline. Maps drawn centuries prior and subject to elucidation ended up grist for arrive utilize debate as designers capitalize on each square inch.

“That’s Unused York,,”Ms. Hudson said. “It needs to be modern. We fair grant them the maps and they have to battle it out.”

Ms. Hudson persevered one scene that shocked the craftsmanship world in 2006, when Edward Forbes Smiley III, a regarded outline merchant who specialized in finding slippery treasures for wealthy collectors, conceded that he had stolen 97 uncommon maps from the Unused York Open Library and other institutions.

In 1977, she was a author of the Unused York Outline Society, which offers an yearly grant in her title to understudies seeking after degrees at Seeker College’s School of Geology and Natural Science, portion of the City College of Modern York. She was one of the to begin with two inductees into the society’s corridor of fame.

She too instructed a outline librarianship course at Pratt Founded in Modern York, mentored endless understudies and analysts and guided the library’s outline division into the computerized future.

In 2001, she was honored with the Support for the City of Unused York’s Sloan Open Benefit Grant, which recognizes unheralded civic employees.

“She illustrated, to eras of analysts, understudies, exhibition-goers, library chairmen, that maps give basic setting in understanding human encounter as it unfurls over places, and over time,” said Stamp A. Knutzen, who worked with Ms. Hudson in the outline division and is presently the Linda May Uris chief of the Humanities and Social Sciences Inquire about Divisions at the library.

Or, as a sticker on her car bumper said, “Without topography, you’re nowhere.”

Ms. Hudson was born on Walk 17, 1947, in Oak Edge, Tenn. Her father, George, was an circuit repairman who worked in Oak Edge at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which was built for the Manhattan Venture to enhance uranium for the to begin with nuclear bombs. Her mother, Eva (Borgers) Hudson, was a teacher.

As a young person, Alice, whose more seasoned sister was a custodian, worked as a page at the open library’s Donnell Library Center, on West 53rd Road in Manhattan. Yearning to gotten to be a interpreter for the Joined together Countries, she graduated from Center Tennessee College and at that point earned a Ace of Library Science degree from Peabody College at Vanderbilt College in Nashville.

There she was required to take a course in topography and got to be interested by it. “I delighted in the approach to world information through physical features,” she told the Diary of Outline and Topography Libraries in 2010, and how indeed financial matters and social issues “came together through the geographic lens.”

The Modern York Open Library’s outline division contracted her in 1970 and advanced her to partner chief in 1978.

Ms. Hudson curated the related 2001 presentations “Heading West/Touring West: Mapmakers, Performing Craftsmen, and the American Frontier” with Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner; made a difference inquire about “The Authentic Chart book of Modern York City,” by Eric Homberger (1994), and, with Mary Ritzlin, made a registry of pre-20th-century mapmakers.

In expansion to Mr. Trager, she is survived by a grandniece.