Blog: Tellme

When I was at Tellme, I built the Restaurants channel for 1-800-555-TELL, the Tellme Voice Portal. Restaurants allowed the user to pick a city and state, and hear a list of nearby restaurants. Hearing a list of sushi places in Los Angeles isn't so useful, so I also added a way for users to pick individual neighborhoods for larger cities.

Unlike with city boundaries which are clearly defined, there's no definitive source for neighborhood boundaries, and actually there's really no unofficial source either. Individual cities' Web sites, and travel books, make some attempt, but they all disagree. I solved this at Tellme by just buying a bunch of books and picking out a center for each neighborhood as best I could, then finding restaurants by proximity to that point.

The Neighborhood Project uses Craigslist data to map neighborhoods based on what their residents call each area. They have it for San Francisco only right now, but it's fascinating. (My one complaint about the site is that the "my browser sucks" link should really be "my browser sucks, or else I have a big enough screen that I can look at the whole map and don't need your fancy magnification widget thingie".)

Some neighborhoods are clearly defined, while in other areas nobody seems to agree on what to call them (what's the area around Dolores Park? I've always wondered myself). Using housing listings is of course biased; nobody says they are in the Tenderloin. And some neighborhoods, like possibly Hayes Valley, are significantly larger than they "should" be because people want to claim they are in that neighborhood (are those really Noe Valley dots north of Market?)

It would be really interesting to see this map for NYC, and also to track it longitudinally over time. Some neighborhoods get larger as people want to claim they are in that neighborhood, but then sometimes people rebel against being swallowed up by an area and embrace a gritty name associated with a neighborhood's former character (like "Hell's Kitchen").