Aklo is a city, but not. This is an irony, as there are signs along the road pointing to its location. But a Google Maps searcher can’t find it. There was a time when it received tourists. Today the fictional city is reminiscent of what it once was.
Although a product of two men’s imaginations, Aklo is as real as the story of its founding. It was founded in 1937 by Otto G., the founder of the General Drafting Company, which specialized in the production of road maps. Developed by Lindbergh and his assistant Ernst Albers. They were looking for a way to prove possible plagiarism by their competitors. Then they put their initials together and decided to place the resulting anagram at NY 206 and Morton Hill Rod, north of the small town of Roscoe, two hours by road from New York, amid the spectacular Catskills. As a trap, it’s kind of like that Copyright Very naively, they added the city they discovered to their map.
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What began as a formula for these two men to protect the copyright of their cartographic works turned into a real place. AndIn the 1950s, a store with the name Aglo General Store appeared at the intersection. The owner named it when he saw the legend on the road map of the Esso oil company. Later, it reappeared on another map, this one from Rand McNally Publishing, after one of their cartographers received a note from the Delaware County Executive. These were not isolated incidents: Oglow continued to be mentioned on road maps until the 1990s when someone saw fit to remove its presence.
The disappearance of its traditional maps hasn’t stopped Google Maps from falling for the trick. Aglo was formally added to the Internet Giants database in 2014. In fact, A review of its location can still be found on Google Log, dated June 3, 2015. It reads: “Aglo, NY, is located somewhere between the two northernmost points on this map, separated by half a mile. Two other reference points show the closest towns to Aklow: Rockland and Roscoe”. Even today, the United States Geological Survey includes the town under the ‘unofficial’ designation in its Geographic Names Information System.
The city reached its peak of popularity because of this novel Paper cities, written by author John Green, was published in 2008. The novel tells the story of Margot Roth Spiegelman, who decides to disappear and leaves her whereabouts to her friend Quentin Jacobson. Before disappearing, the young woman writes: “You will go to paper cities and you will never return.” Green immortalized Aglo forever A symbol of the need to lose oneself in order to find oneself, shown by some people. The novel was adapted to cinema in 2015, starring model and actress Cada Delevingne in the movie of the same name.
Invented or not, there are still people who go to the intersection to take photos with the sign that once stood as a city, as real as the imagination of those who want to believe it was.
