The Cartographer of St. Petersburg's Alleys

Aylin Cruz keeps her notebooks in a milk crate on the back of a bicycle. There are, at present, twenty-seven notebooks. Each one contains hand-drawn maps of a single quadrant of St. Petersburg, with every unpermitted mural in that quadrant located, sketched, and annotated in Aylin's small, tidy handwriting.

She started in 2022, after a wall she'd loved on Central Avenue was painted over without notice. 'I wanted to remember,' she said. 'That was all.' Three years and roughly nine hundred murals later, she is halfway through Pinellas County. She estimates it will take her another three years to finish, though she notes, cheerfully, that the murals themselves are being added faster than she can map them. 'It is,' she said, 'a race I am losing on purpose.'

Aylin does not photograph the murals. She draws them, in pencil, sometimes in colored pencil, always from life. Her sketches are looser than the originals, but her maps are exact. A curator at the Museum of Fine Arts recently asked to exhibit them. Aylin declined. 'They belong,' she said, 'in the milk crate.'