February 22, 2006
Map of the Day: GoogleCenter of the World
Wired has a story today on the Googlecenter of America-- the place that you find if you zoom in to the closest point on the default Google map (it's a fallow field outside of Coffeyville, Kansas.) This got us thinking: where is the Googlecenter of New York City? Turns out it's the corner of Chambers and Broadway, right behind city hall. That makes some sense to us-- although there are probably better candidates-- Times Square, Grand Central Station, etc. Curious about the Googlecenter of your borough? Read on:
Manhattan (Chambers and Broadway)
Brooklyn (corner of Nostrand and Erasmus in Flatbush)
Bronx (corner of Holland and Hunt Avenue in Pelham Park)
Queens (77th Avenue and 141st Street)
Staten Island (Forrest Hills Road and Leason Place)
Don't confuse the Googlecenter of New York with the actual geographic center-- that's at "40 degrees, 42 minutes, 51 seconds N latitude, and 74 degrees, 0 minutes 23 seconds W longitude" -- but we couldn't figure out how to put that into Google Maps.
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Your map is the actual geographic center of the city! Google uses decimal degrees (look in the url for 40.714167, -74.006389). The center is not where many people would intuitively think because Staten Island is so much further south and west than the other boroughs. Pretty prescient of someone to site City Hall there 200 years ago.
Joe's right though I would wonder where the geographical center of Manhattan is because Staten Island doesn't really count as NY in my book.
I put "manhattan, ny" into Google maps and got near 48th and 6th.
It's easy to map the actual geographic center of New York City using Google Earth. Just copy the text below and paste it into Windows Notepad, save it as a file called "nyc.kml", open it with Google Earth, and have fun:
**** copy everything beneath here ****
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<kml xmlns="http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0">
<Folder>
<name>Gothamist Locations</name>
<open>1</open>
<Placemark>
<name>Center of New York City</name>
<description>
<![CDATA[This is the actual geographic center of New York City.<br><br>
See: http://www.ny.com/histfacts/geography.html]]>
</description>
<LookAt id="khLookAt688">
< longitude>-74.00006388888887</longitude>
< latitude>40.71416666666669</latitude>
< range>30000</range>
</LookAt>
<Point id="khPoint689">
< coordinates>-74.0000638888889,40.71416666666669,0</coordinates>
</Point>
</Placemark>
</Folder>
</kml>
**** copy everything above here ****
You can type in minutes and seconds as well, and google maps will format it into decimals for you.
Enter the following in the search box:
40 42' 51" -74 0' 23"
-Mark
ahhh...the centroid issue is out! if you've ever searched for something using a zip code, you might find a point representing that area--it's the weighted average of the polygon. great for techies to optimize dbases, not so good for real people. it's like reducing a book to a paragraph...
What's even freakier is the location of the original Duane Reade's drugstore - between Duane and Reade Sts, natch. It's like the center of an unstoppable epidemic slowly reproducing throughout the city.
Isn't it possible that google maps are pre-programmed to center on any city's "City Hall"?
Try it with Boston, or LA. Maybe others work too, not sure.
Does Gothamist know that Grand Central Station is either a post office Lexington Avenue or the IRT subway station that serves Grand Central Terminal. . .
The geographic center of Boston is Roxbury, so downtown is most certainly not it.