welcome lowell & thanx
a few hundred messages before your arrival we actually did
trace this ellis island boundary renovation work thru these web
pages you mention to its & their source in the nj dep
& thru the people who created the pages & indeed the boundary
itself we acquired a copy of their finished survey blueprint & the
official list of the 182 submillimetric metes & bounds that were
actually reviewed & finally blessed by the supremes when the
new boundary was finalized in the late 1990s
incidentally & oddly enough tho
only the initial point of their survey is rendered in gps coords
& indeed this is taken down to five decimal places of degminsec
so i figure that that alone locks everything into place just fine
for anyone with the technology necessary to pursue it from there
because the rest is hyper precise
but odder still
this same initial point is then legally redefined as being
quote
about 502 feet
from the end of a certain wall
& then
offset by a certain also utterly precise angle but
quote again
about 10 feet
from there
so only the best of gps receivers could get us beyond our
present level of whistling in the dark here anyway
& yet it is just these ordinary inadequate materials that we
arif & asher & i mike & perhaps rich the guy from the nj dep too
will have to smuggle onto ellis island next week in hopes of
finding or even just approximating anything at all of this
otherwise completely invisible state line
for the word from our informants in the nj dep is that there isnt a
jot or any trace of demarcation on the ground there
so i was just planning to have some fun by hammering in a few
nails at some of the supposed turnpoints & joining them with
string so as to mock & ham it up a little for the camera
but now it appears we will be lucky if we manage to sneak just
the paperwork & even a cloth tape measure or a stick of chalk
past the zealous border guards on the new york side
it could well be easier to go at it from the nj side
where the security is likely to be more relaxed
& the native appreciation for the new state line greater
& this might be the natural fallback too if we fail to get thru in ny
but since we are already committed to doing the impossible
here anyway
i figure what would be the point of starting off so easy
--- In
BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, "Lowell G. McManus"
<mcmanus71496@m...> wrote:
> It was written:
>
> > also just learned our already quite challenging & ambitious
try to
> > find the tiny & totally unmarked njny state line at ellis island
next
> > sunday...
>
> Sounds like fun! Perhaps you know, but the final boundary line
is shown
> superimposed on an aerial photo at
> www.state.nj.us/dep/gis/images/mapcon1999/mapcomp.jpg .
Although the boundary
> as decided by the US Supreme Court in 2000 might be totally
undemarcated on the
> landscape, a delimitation of it in terms of GPS coordinates has
been made from
> an 1857 map and officially accepted by both states. See
> www.state.nj.us/dep/gis/images/mapcon1999/thornton.html
on how this was done.