Saturday, June 24, 2006

"Here lies United Hospital" or "Let's go downtown to Wesley College"

Take a look at the map of Grand Forks that appears in the Yellow Book phone directory that should have shown up on your doorstep a few days ago. As reported in today's Herald by Eba Hamid, there are some really interesting landmarks on the map.

First off, did you know that United Hospital is still around and sits somewhere in Memorial Park Cemetery? At least that's what the map shows. And here I thought they changed the name to Altru Hospital about a decade ago and the building was a couple miles to the south...boy was I dumb!

The map also points out Wesley College in downtown Grand Forks. Of course, Wesley College was actually located directly north of the UND campus and went out of operation in the 1960s. But according to that map, it's still around...so who am I to argue?

Also, did you know that St. James High School really didn't close down in the 1960s? At least that's what the map shows. And here Catholic parents have been sending their kids over the river to Sacred Heart all of these years for nothing!

According to this very informative map, Red River High School is actually just a figment of our imagination and doesn't really exist, but Central High School is still plugging along...on the south side of downtown.

Ok, I'm being sarcastic. I noticed these very interesting landmarks on the Yellow Book map when I got the directory the other day and was going to contact the company to point out the magnitude of their errors. Looks like Eba Hamid already beat me to it...they did hang up on him(?) though. I guess the map isn't the important thing about a phone book, huh? At least not to Yellow Book...

4 comments:

Good Ol' Boy said...

Yeah, I saw last night that the online maps for the Yellow Pages has the Boardwalk area of East Grand Forks with train tracks through it!

I learned long ago that those maps can be full of errors- on different occasions I found my business 2 miles NW of the town it was, or alternately 3 miles east. In each case, I wrote and asked for changes to be made. Never happened. Phfff...

Tom-Tom- WTF?

Rick said...

What a mess-up! It would'nt be too bad if it was just a business or something, but to put the location of a hospital in the wrong area is terrible. What if someone who doesn't know where the hospital is would look in the yellow pages for it and find that it wasn't the right location? That would be bad. I wonder if it'll be changed anytime soon.

Anonymous said...

well i will tell you this ... http://www.mapsetc.com/ ... is probally not going to be my first choice for maps... lol

dale said...

I returned a Garmin 2720 GPS earlier this year for problems like this -- really far off the mark points of interest. In Grand Forks, for example, Garmin GPS units running City Navigator believe that Target is located in the parking lot of the Hugos on South Washington, and that Sharon Lutheran Church is south of Happy Harrys on 32nd. Just two of many examples, and it wasn't confined to GF -- we found dozens of errors on a road trip to Tennessee.