Pop Spots NYC

Are you situated on that part of The Venn Diagram of Pop Culture Obsessions where "classic rock album cover minutiae" and "urban cartography" overlap? Then we have just the website for you. Run by a gentleman named Bob Egan, Pop Spots NYC is clearly a personal hobby: the barebones HTML coding is endearingly reminiscent of the days when AOL discs clogged everyone's mailboxes. But what he lacks in fancy design skills he makes up for in determination to discover and document, to the greatest possible degree of accuracy, exactly where classic album covers were shot. And the term "exactly" is not used lightly: he doesn't just find the subway station where Simon and Garfunkel shot the sleeve photo for their debut album Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., he does his best to track down the exact support post Paul Simon is leaning against. Egan's taste runs to Manhattan-centric locations and the leading lights of classic FM rock -- mid-'60s Bob Dylan is a particular fascination -- but even if those aren't your favorite topics, the dogged earnestness of his pursuit holds its own charm. Egan structures his searches as diaries, leaving the false starts and empty trails intact and providing deposition-like photographs (both his own and Google Maps stills) carefully marked with circles and arrows highlighting points of similarity. It's the work of a man who is his own target audience, which makes Pop Spots NYC a delightful throwback to the days before blogs were market-tested, when like-minded people could find themselves.