Stanford University Map 1943 Pictorial Print - Stanford, Palo Alto, Hoover Tower

Arthur Lites produced this early promotional pictorial bird's-eye view map of Stanford University in 1943, commissioned by the university's own board of trustees to promote the campus visually to prospective students, donors and visitors. Pictorial bird's-eye view maps of individual institutions flourished through the early to mid-twentieth century as a distinctive promotional format, combining the informational usefulness of a campus map with the visual appeal of an illustrated panorama, and this Stanford commission fits squarely within that tradition. The map arrives during the middle of World War II, a period when Stanford, like many American universities, had reoriented significant portions of its campus and curriculum toward wartime training and research even as ordinary academic promotion continued. Its board-of-trustees commission gives the map an official institutional pedigree distinct from the more commercially independent pictorial maps produced for cities and resorts during the same period.

Stanford University sits on the San Francisco Peninsula in Santa Clara Valley, its sprawling campus founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in the late nineteenth century and by 1943 already established as one of the leading universities in the American West. Palo Alto, the town immediately adjoining the campus, grew up specifically to serve the university's students, faculty and staff, its own development inseparable from Stanford's institutional growth through the early twentieth century. San Francisco, some thirty miles to the north, anchors the wider Bay Area region within which Stanford's campus sits, the dominant commercial and cultural center for the peninsula communities surrounding the university. Together these three places situate Stanford's position within a California university landscape still decades away from the postwar technology boom that would eventually transform the surrounding valley.

This pictorial map makes a fitting gift for a Stanford alumnus or a Palo Alto family with roots tied to the university's wartime years, or for a collector of institutional bird's-eye view maps from the mid-twentieth century specifically. Its trustee-commissioned origin gives it a documentary standing distinct from the tourist-oriented pictorial maps more commonly found for California cities and beach towns of the same era. It's supplied unframed and available across our full range of sizes, from a small desk print to a large-format piece for a bigger wall.