stuff to send to your annoying friends who always claim they could never live here.
Tag: mapping
Vermeer 1658 street view
fun bit of art history research with old tax maps etc to determine that vermeer’s view of houses in delft is really a 1658 street view of Vlamingstraat 40
Manhattan Microdistricts
how many microdistricts could there be in the city? I wasn’t imagining things — the Flatiron District, or more specifically, a stretch of 18th Street between Fifth and Eighth Avenue, is home to an unusually high concentration of furniture, kitchen, and bath stores. SoHo also has a high share of furniture stores, in spite of, or alongside, its famed shopping. Most surprising, however, is the concentration of furniture stores at 59th and Third Avenue, at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge. Does the cluster serve Queens residents as they leave Manhattan, or was this location best, decades ago, for Queens furniture makers to sell their work in the city?
ManyCities
“ManyCities” is a new website that “explores the spatio-temporal patterns of mobile phone activity in cities across the world,” including London, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong. Taking complex data and organizing it in a intuitive way, the application allows users to quickly visualize patterns of human movement within the urban context down to the neighborhood scale. You can imagine how useful a tool like this can be for urban planners or even daily commuters, especially once real time analytics come into play. Take a look at ManyCities yourself, here.
Russia Mapped the World
While Davies and Kent found information that could only have come from spies on the ground—a bridge in Miami, for example, has information that only an eyewitness could have provided—there were fewer of these instances than shows like The Americans might suggest. “There were probably not a lot of people going around with notebooks. There was, after all, plenty in the public domain—maps, but also street directories, tourist guides, railway timetables, and the like.”
Historical NYC street view
A great way to waste some time.
This site provides an alternative way of browsing the NYPL’s incredible Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. Its goal is to help you discover the history behind the places you see every day. And, if you’re lucky, maybe you’ll even discover something about New York’s rich past that you never knew before!
Longest subway ride
if you wanted to live on the subway but not a particular line.
Donut Holes
Sovereignty over land defines nation states since 1648. In contrast, sovereign right over the sea was formalized only in 1982. The beauty of complexity is apparent when you explore the areas that cannot be grasped by any neighboring state. These are the so-called donut hole
Book of Legendary Lands
new umberto eco!
The Book of Legendary Lands an illustrated voyage into history’s greatest imaginary places, with all their fanciful inhabitants and odd customs, on scales as large as the mythic continent Atlantis and as small as the fictional location of Sherlock Holmes’s apartment. A dynamic tour guide for the human imagination, Eco sets out to illuminate the central mystery of why such utopias and dystopias appeal to us so powerfully and enduringly, what they reveal about our relationship with reality, and how they bespeak the quintessential human yearning to make sense of the world and find our place in it
NYC type foundry district
I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909. All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 