Midtown Manhatten Map

City that sleeps in the suburbs: Mapping the night-day population change in ...

It might be the city that never sleeps, but this graphic shows most people leave before going to bed.

Information graphics artist Joe Lertola produced this fascinating image showing the stark difference in the population of Manhattan, New York, depending on the time of day.

It appears to show New York has more commuters than residents – with the downtown financial district and midtown areas having the biggest increase in temporary population during the day.

‘The New York City day/night population map was interesting because the data presented on the map was not available to the public before,’ Mr Lertola told Urban Omnibus.

He said the data was produced for the U.S. government and is classified – but Time magazine got permission to use it as long as actual number values were not displayed on the graphic.

The map also shows an average daily commute to the city of 34 minutes, with people arriving from all over New York City’s suburbs, Long Island, upstate, New Jersey and other areas further afield.

Mr Lertola worked for Time magazine between 1983 and 2008, and produced the graphic in 2007 – although it has recently come back to prominence after being featured on a number of blogs.

He told Urban Omnibus he treats every graphic as a ‘fresh problem’ and does ‘a lot of playing around with ideas, sketches and discussion of various approaches’.

"However in an interesting aside, Roosevelt Island's population doubles at night - and the Upper East Side and Lower East Side areas retain most of their population at night." No mystery to the quote above from the article: Roosevelt Island is not part of Manhattan, it is a residential neighborhood, which can be reached from Manhattan by taking the Tram or by subway (one stop). Residents of the island work in Manhattan and then return home - that is why the population doubles. The Upper East Side and Lower East Side are not as highly commercial or have the same number of office buildings as Midtown, they are populous areas of Manhattan and the site of many restaurants and nightclubs, which is why the retain their population at night. However, this is a very interesting study!

- Morgan, New York, 02/8/2011 14:08

Most cities in the US are actually office parks where almost no one lives. I am surprised to see that Manhattan is nearly the same. It is almost impossible to live within a city that has been created or boomed since the invention of the automobile because there are no residences. Those that were well established before the automobile have become unaffordable, yet criminals manage to be there in great numbers after the work day, and who needs that? People flee danger from criminals and try to avoid being robbed via extremely high rent and cost of living. It's only natural. US cities are now only for the very wealthy and the very poor who are criminals. Who is going to build residences, lower rents and pay for high volume, constant police patrols for the middle class in cities? Nobody - it simply doesn't pay the bills.

Mapping New York City's Runnability — The Pop-Up City

“What does it look like when an entire city goes running? And how can we use that data to improve the experience of runners in different cities?” Brooklyn-based interaction designer Cooper Smith created a stunning series of interactive maps that visualizes New York City on Nike Plus. Interested the quality of location, Smith used data derived from over a thousand geo-located runs to draw his own map of the Big Apple, from the shape of the Manhattan landmass down to its individual streets.

Smith shows that the huge data set of Nike Plus runs is a great source of valuable information about how runners perceive the urban realm. As many of you may know, Nike Plus lets you map your runs and track your progress using a sensor or the Nike+ GPS iPhone app. Work-outs can be synced and saved directly on Nikeplus.com profiles, where a bunch of graphically presented statistical information is made available. Smith did an interesting job with this research. His mapping results are perfectly able to tell, for instance, which spots are most popular to excercise. I can imagine his Nike Plus mapping projects to offer a great deal of valuable information to local authorities when it comes to improving the urban leisure landscape.

Not surprisingly, Central Park is the most popular place, followed by the trails along the edge of Manhattan, as well as the bridges between Manhattan and Brooklyn. He concludes that “people who begin their runs in Central Park tend to go for longer runs, while those who start outside of Central Park and run into it tend to go for shorter runs”. Furthermore, Smith was able to obtain insight in how different types of urban settings affected the average pace of the runners. Of course, Central Park scores well when it comes to fast runs. Midtown Manhattan seems to be a bad area for running since almost everyone’s pace slows due to the high number of traffic lights and crowds. By drawing a red dot on the map every time a runner stands still for more than ten seconds, he was able to see which parts of the city caused the most interruptions.

Be sure to check out Cooper Smith’s website for more images and videos of the Nike Plus New York City visualization project!

New York Map of Midtown Manhattan/Folded

Hagstrom map of Midtown Manhattan, places of principal interest

AIA Guide to New York City

Midtown Manhattan Mini Map

New York Magazine