When President Donny first mentioned renaming the Gulf of Mexico (at best on United States maps), many people, myself included, thought it was just more Trumpian noise. Oh, no. On Inauguration Day, he told the Department of the Interior to rename it the Gulf of America on maps, charts, and in all official documents. It is not clear if this renaming business was included in Project 2025, or if the guy came up with the idea on his own.
As stupid as it was, it reminded me of a similar effort of my own right here in East Hampton. With the rise of online mapping, a petty annoyance in the real estate ads grew to really bother me: In Google Maps and the others, the southernmost section of Gardiner’s Bay, on whose shores I and my kids grew up, is mismarked as “Napeague Bay.” Unlike the president snapping his stubby fingers and it was done, the work I and a tireless Steve Boerner, then at the library next door, did went on for years.
We went through channels, writing the Department of the Interior Board on Geographic Place Names, which opened a file. Steve and I collected at least a dozen maps, published references, and statements from oral histories to make our case. We discovered that up until a 1956 United States Geologic Survey map, the stretch of water from Cherry Point to the Devon Yacht Club was never said to be Napeague Bay. We amassed land deeds, property surveys, even got official letters from the town board and the trustees. It took nine years before our case agent at Interior felt we were ready for the place names board to make a ruling.
In 2013, Steve went to Washington to present our findings. In addition to the board on geographic names, there were representatives of several federal agencies including the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration and the Library of Congress. The board did not decide in our favor until 2019, though I’ll be damned if I can remember now what the holdup was. It turned out that the Gardiner’s-Napeague Bay error was just that, a mistake made by a field agent verifying a 1950s quadrangle survey before it was published. The suspicion was that the person in charge of the Amagansett railroad station had given him bad information. The agent’s notation in red ink remains on the map, which is stored at the U.S.G.S., bless their hearts.
For all that, it hasn’t worked. Nine years on it is still wrong on Google Maps.