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 enrolling in a mandatory geography course in college, took a detour from her plan to become a professional translator and went on to devote her career to building one of the world’s premier public map collections, died on Nov. 6 in Manhattan. She was 77.

Her death, in a senior living facility, was apparently caused by complications of kidney disease, said Robert Trager, her nephew.

Ms. Hudson was chief of the Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division of the New York Public Library from 1981 to 2009, presiding over what has been called the most heavily used public map room in the world. She oversaw the doubling of the collection, to more than 400,000 maps and 24,000 atlases, rivaling the holdings of the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the British Library.

She mounted exhibitions on how topography influenced history on the American frontier and along New York City’s shoreline, and illuminated the overlooked contribution of women to cartography.

“The women are there, but literally behind the veil of social and cultural constraints that continue to this day,” Ms. Hudson said in an address to the International Cartographic Association in 1995.

“In the world of early maps,” she added, “unsigned colorists, names masked by initials, widows and heirs without their own names, women in cartographic tomes but not in their indexes — are all lost to us unless unveiled by accident or design.”

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

“A map is so much more than a diagram showing how to get from Point A to Point B,” she told The New York Times in 2002. “Every map tells a story.”

The year before, in another Times interview, she said: “I can remember driving in Westchester once and saying, ‘All of Manhattan used to be like this. Rooks and rills and brooks and dirt roads and gardens and farms. On the old maps you can see, the city is just a pink triangle. The Bowery was lined with old, beautiful farms.”

For all the conventional wisdom that change is the one constant in New York, “sometimes it’s the sameness of the city that strikes me,” she added. “There were ethnic neighborhoods early on clustered together in the same places they are now.”

Ms. Hudson cataloged African American historical sites revealed by early New York City maps, including Weeksville, a 19th-century enclave of freed slaves in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn, and Seneca Village, a Black and Irish working-class community in Manhattan, between 81st and 86th Streets, that was razed to allow the construction of Central Park.

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

The library’s maps aren’t merely museum pieces, however.

“People from construction sites will come in and wonder why they’re standing in a lake,” Ms. Hudson said. The answer is that Manhattan has been built on lots of landfill that hid underground streams, ponds and aquifers and that extended the shoreline. Maps drawn centuries ago and subject to interpretation become grist for land use disputes as developers capitalize on every square inch.

“That’s New York,,”Ms. Hudson said. “It wants to be new. We just give them the maps and they have to fight it out.”

Ms. Hudson endured one episode that stunned the art world in 2006, when Edward Forbes Smiley III, a respected map dealer who specialized in finding elusive treasures for rich collectors, admitted that he had stolen 97 rare maps from the New York Public Library and other institutions.

In 1977, she was a founder of the New York Map Society, which offers an annual award in her name to students pursuing degrees at Hunter College’s School of Geography and Environmental Science, part of the City University of New York. She was one of the first two inductees into the society’s hall of fame.

She also taught a map librarianship course at Pratt Institute in New York, mentored countless students and researchers and guided the library’s map division into the digital future.

In 2001, she was honored with the Fund for the City of New York’s Sloan Public Service Award, which recognizes unheralded civic employees.

“She demonstrated, to generations of researchers, students, exhibition-goers, library administrators, that maps provide essential context in understanding human experience as it unfolds across places, and over time,” said Mark A. Knutzen, who worked with Ms. Hudson in the map division and is now the Linda May Uris director of the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Divisions at the library.

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

Ms. Hudson was born on March 17, 1947, in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Her father, George, was an electrician who worked in Oak Ridge at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which was built for the Manhattan Project to enrich uranium for the first atomic bombs. Her mother, Eva (Borgers) Hudson, was a teacher.

As a teenager, Alice, whose older sister was a librarian, worked as a page at the public library’s Donnell Library Center, on West 53rd Street in Manhattan. Aspiring to become a translator for the United Nations, she graduated from Middle Tennessee University and then earned a Master of Library Science degree from Peabody College at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

There she was required to take a course in geography and became intrigued by it. “I enjoyed the approach to world knowledge through physical features,” she told the Journal of Map and Geography Libraries in 2010, and how even economics and social issues “came together through the geographic lens.”

The New York Public Library’s map division hired her in 1970 and promoted her to assistant chief in 1978.

Ms. Hudson curated the related 2001 exhibitions “Heading West/Touring West: Mapmakers, Performing Artists, and the American Frontier” with Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner; helped research “The Historical Atlas of New York City,” by Eric Homberger (1994), and, with Mary Ritzlin, created a directory of pre-20th-century mapmakers.

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