![]() He was working as an editor at Reader’s Digest Books in 1990, compiling a historical atlas, when he came across an early-17th-century Mercato r/Hondius map that showed Cuba at the top, Hispaniola at the bottom and three small insets of Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Margarita Island. Gonzalez recalled the moment when his interest was reignited through maps. ![]() Much of his ambivalence was the result of “that first-generation thing about ‘am I American or Dominican?’ “ But once he started college, he said, his attachment began to loosen. Gonzalez continued to make the trip every year, except for 1965, when the United States Marines invaded Santo Domingo amid the turmoil that followed Trujillo’s death. As Trujillo’s regime was ending, the country experienced considerable violence. Gonzalez visited his parents’ homeland with his mother. It was only after the assassination of the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 that Mr. The earliest printed maps of Hispaniola fill a guest bedroom. I grew up in that, and felt a close connection to the island.” “At that time, there was a very tiny Dominican community in New York and ties were tight among the people. Gonzalez, who was born in New York in 1951. ![]() “She was caught by the war, when travel anywhere overseas suddenly became difficult, and stayed here, and that is how my parents met,” said Mr. His father emigrated from the Dominican Republic to New York in the 1930s, and his mother, who was born in a tiny Dominican town called Moca, arrived in the city as a tourist in 1941. Gonzalez, the attraction to Hispaniola is personal. To ensure that every cartouche, sea monster and rhumb line remains vibrant, the men keep the Venetian blinds in their south-facing apartment drawn, as if for a permanent siesta.įor Mr. Credit Randy Harris for The New York TimesĪnd be prepared to squint when you look at them. Gonzalez, is the oldest printed map of the island, nor the Rand McNally road map of 1939, nor anything in between.įolding closet doors feature the “Wall of Death,” or images of colonial atrocities from the 1594 “Grands Voyages” series by Theodor de Bry. Not the Bordoni map, which was drawn in Italy in 1528 and, according to Mr. But they have never sold, nor do they plan to sell, a single map from their private Hispaniola collection. Magnus, dealers who own a business called Fair Winds Antique Maps, are happy to sell you maps of the Americas, Mediterranean and Holy Land. Once Hispaniola was the center of the New World. No wall, bookcase, support column or closet door is without an image of the 400-mile-long, 150-mile-wide island, which is divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. That is the number of antique maps of Hispaniola and the West Indies that he and his partner, Ralph Magnus, have collected and hung in their three-bedroom apartment on Union Square. Not unlike Christopher Columbus, Joseph Gonzalez is in search of the New World. Credit Randy Harris for The New York Times The living room’s treasures include a 1634 map by Willem Janszoon Blaeu (foreground, center left), one of only 10 in the world. Joseph Gonzalez and Ralph Magnus’s Union Square, New York apartment is filled with maps of Hispaniola and the West Indies.
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