Walking Distance Locator Kiosk

Between 1989 and 1990, if you were walking through downtown Boston and came across a “Walking Distance Locator” kiosk, you could print a map just like the one shown here. Installed by the startup Visual Media Inc., these granite kiosks printed small locator maps that marked select businesses within a 15-minute walk. Users could print maps using a directory that included such options as “Tanning salons,” “Automated teller machines,” and “Toy stores.” Taking a page out of the “telephone directory” playbook, only businesses who paid a subscription fee could appear in the kiosk’s database (and thus, appear on the map). Although the kiosks themselves didn’t last long, they did anticipate a kind of geographic—even navigational—advertising that has come to define our current moment through tools like Google Maps, which serves targeted advertisements based on a user’s location and profile.