reedk

It's important to note that this is not a news article and the writer, Robin Sloan, is not a journalist. This is an opinion piece by a (very good!) novelist. He is free to articulate his opinion without "significant evidence" and you are free to think his opinion is baseless.

The USDA made a neighborhood-level map of "food deserts"-- communities where a significant portion of residents do not have easy access to large grocery stores and healthy food options. http://www.ers.usda.gov/data/fooddesert/ It would be interesting to see the two maps layered.

Thanks for the upvote! I really like the idea of combining reviews from different publications on one map, especially with a filter to specify which ones to make visible.

I used the Google Maps Geocoding API to convert street addresses into lat/lng. It seems to handle the idiosyncrasies of Queens addresses well. That said, if you see something that looks out of place, please let me know and I'll correct the data.

Sorry about that... Google wanted my money. Back up now.

Filtering by price, date reviewed, and open/closed status are in the backlog! Would you have a preference for the price as described by The New Yorker or by Yelp? (Or by some other source?)

To be clear: The red pins are restaurants that have gone out of business and are closed permanently; not restaurants that aren't currently open, but will open later in the day for (e.g. for dinner).

The Yelp API provides data on whether a restaurant is still in business and is fairly accurate.

Hi Michael- So glad that you like it! I'd love to hear more about what your team is working on. (I suppose it's not a dieresis on/off switch.) I'll shoot you an email.

Good thought! Will add it to the list.

Thanks! I like to build things that would be useful to me and it delights me to hear that other people find them useful to.

Yup, just scraping. Then hitting Google Geocoding API for lat/lng and the Yelp API for reviews and open/closed status.