Agloe, New York

I came across the Wikipedia page for Agloe, NY, and it’s the perfect storm of interesting, relevant, and nerdy. Agloe, NY only sort of exists in the sense it was made as a copyright trap, but then actualized by people who set up shop in the fictional town. Then, at some point after being real, becomes not real.

Agloe is a fictional place in Delaware County, New York, that became an actual landmark after mapmakers made up the town as a copyright trap.

In the 1930s, General Drafting Company founder Otto G. Lindberg and an assistant, Ernest Alpers, assigned an anagram of their initials to a dirt-road intersection in the Catskill Mountains: NY 206 and Morton Hill Road, north of Roscoe, New York. The town was designed as a copyright trap to be able to catch others who might copy their map.

You can read more about Agloe on Radiolab, watch a TED Talk or even listen to an album from Kirk Pearson and BIT about the weird little down that didn’t exist, then did, and now doesn’t.