Agloe City exists, but no. It is ironic because there are signs on the road indicating its location, But whoever searches for it on Google Maps will not find it. There was a time when he used to receive tourists. Today the fictitious city is a memory of what it used to be.
Agloe is as real as its founding story, even if it is the product of two men’s imaginations. It was created in 1937 by Otto G. Lindberg, founder of the General Drafting Company, specializing in the production of road maps, and his assistant Ernst Albers. They were looking for a way to prove possible plagiarism by their competitors. Then they decided to put their initials together and assign an anagram to the intersection of New York 206 and Morton Hill Road, north of the small town of Roscoe, in the midst of the stunning Catskills Mountains, two hours from New York. As a trap, as if it was some kind Copyrights Most innocently, they have included the invented city on their maps.
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What started as a formula for these two men to copyright protect their cartographic creations ended up becoming a real place to be. AndIn the 1950s, a store named Agloe General Store appeared at the intersection. Its owner called it that when he saw the legend on a road map from the Esso oil company. Later, it reappeared on another map, this one from Rand McNally Publishers, after one of the cartographers obtained the reference from the Delaware County Department. These were not isolated events: Agloe continued to be mentioned in roadmaps until 1990, when someone saw fit to remove her presence.
The fading of traditional maps hasn’t stopped Google Maps from falling for the trick. Agloe was officially included in the database of the Internet giant until 2014. In fact, A review of his site can still be found in the Google entry, dated June 3, 2015. It reads: “The city of Agloe, New York, is located somewhere between two points in the far north of this map, separated by half a mile. The other two points indicated show the closest cities to Agloe: Rockland and Roscoe.” Even today, the United States Geological Survey still includes the city, under an “unofficial” reference in its Geographic Names Information System.
The city was at the height of its popularity thanks to the novel Paper cities, by John Green, published in 2008. The novel tells the story of Margot Roth Spiegelman, who decides to disappear and leave clues to her whereabouts to her friend Quentin Jacobsen. Before disappearing, she lets the young woman write: “You’ll go to the Paper Towns and never come back.” Green forever immortalized as Agloe A symbol of the need to lose oneself in order to find oneself by certain individuals. The novel was adapted for cinema in 2015, in a film of the same name starring model and actress Cada Delevingne.
Invented or not, there are still those who go to the intersection to take pictures with a sign indicating that there was, once upon a time, a city as real as the imaginations of those who wanted to believe it.
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