

The Manhattan Grid extended to every point on Earth - kikibobo69
http://extendny.com

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cfinke
This will greatly simplify trips between NY and my home in MN: "Driver, drop
me off at the corner of 6,593 Ave and S 2,265 St."

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kilovoltaire
I showed this yesterday at the NYC meetup Hack&Tell and it seems to have blown
up since then! Thanks for the post.

My favorite part is that the avenues converge at "Manhattan's North Pole" aka
Kazakhstan.

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raldi
Isn't it actually in Uzbekistan?

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kilovoltaire
Ah, you're quite right. I think it used to be in Kazakhstan before my final
tweakings of the grid.

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T-hawk
Very cool of course.

Why do the avenue lines meet at an antipode? In Manhattan, they are parallel,
they don't converge.

I understand the difference between latitude and longitude lines. A meridian
of longitude is a great circle centered at the Earth's center; a line of
latitude is a small circle (the analogue of a chord in a 2D circle on a plane)
whose center lies north or south of the Earth's center in three dimensions.
Longitude lines divide a sphere like slices of an orange, converging at poles;
latitude lines divide a sphere like a tomato slicer and do not converge.

There's actually two "poles"; aside from the one in Uzbekistan that everyone
is seeing, there's another in the South Pacific Ocean at the antipodal point
from Uzbekistan. So the avenues are being treated as meridian lines; great
circles. Would it be more accurate to extrapolate avenues as parallel small
circles?

We could test this theory by inspecting whether Manhattan's actual grid
respects the curvature of the Earth. If the avenues are closer together at the
northern end of the island, then the avenues actually do behave as meridians.
If not, then the extrapolated avenue lines should be small circles and would
not converge. You'd still have a pole in Uzbekistan, where the last street
becomes an arbitrarily small circle, but just one avenue line through it. (I
gotta run at the moment but will throw some trigonometry at this later.)

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stouset
> Why do the avenue lines meet at an antipode? In Manhattan, they are
> parallel, they don't converge.

Sure they do. Manhattan isn't a plane; it's a region on the surface of a
sphere. From Wikipedia[1], "In the spherical plane, all geodesics are great
circles. ...all great circles intersect each other."

Clearly, it's the non-intersecting streets that are at fault here. They
_should_ intersect, but don't.

[1]: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_(geometry)#Spherical>

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T-hawk
That the avenues converge is your assumption. The avenues may not be
geodesics. They may be parallel small circles. Manhattan is of course a region
on the surface of a sphere, but the avenues could behave either way.

Throwing together that promised trigonometry, with some approximations (using
round numbers, ignoring the oblateness of the sphere, ignoring the skew of
Manhattan's grid from due north-south):

    
    
      40° = approx latitude of Manhattan's south end
      40.27° = approx latitude of Manhattan's other end 30 km north
      40000 km * cos(40°) = circumference of the 40° parallel
      40000 km * cos(40.27°) = circumference of the 40.27° parallel
      0.996 = ratio of the distance between avenues at the north end compared to the south
      300 m = assumed approximate distance between avenues at the south end
      298.8 m = expected distance between avenues at the north end
    

If the avenues are geodesics, they should be 1.2m closer to each other at the
north end of Manhattan than the south end. Unfortunately a difference that
small is probably essentially noise and below statistical significance to
actually measure; the width of a sidewalk or a bicycle lane.

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jbooth
The whole world? Like it extends out to Brooklyn and up to the Bronx?

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mcantor
Yeah, maybe even Jersey!

I _know_ , I _know_! Right?!

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mdda
Whatever you say about the rest of the world, New Jersey is definitely not
part of Manhattan... I'm surprised there isn't some kind of grey fuzzing-out
on that part of the globe.

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jessriedel
These things are always only _sorta_ tongue-in-cheek.

[http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/steinberg-
new...](http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/steinberg-
newyorker.jpg)

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Lambent_Cactus
The naming is a little off, isn't it? South of Houston all bets for street
numbers are off, so I'm fine with making up South Xth street, but you should
maintain the consistency the grid currently has.

You've lost the East/West distinction between the streets, so the West streets
are just Xth Street, instead of West Xth Street like they should be. Worse,
the avenues East of 1st should be named alphabetically, not as E Xth Ave. For
consistency, I'd increment them as Ave A, Ave B, Ave C ... Ave Y, Ave Z, Ave
AA, ... You've turned Alphabet City into just the East Avenues. Sacrilege.

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kilovoltaire
I considered doing that, but I thought Ave AAA might just confuse people,
especially people who don't know NYC. And I kind of like that I'm squashing
all the nuances with this simple cruel grid :P

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martingordon
All roads lead to Uzbekistan.

I think this would be a great way to see differences in map projections.

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farlington
Uxbekistan and—in the South Pacific—R'Iyeh, fictional city in Lovecraft where
Cthulhu is held prisoner.

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fishtoaster
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And out near 127,000th st, where it
gets real sketchy and you can never find a taxi, even death may die.

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51Cards
I finally have a NYC address and I'm still paying only Toronto suburbs prices!

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cs702
Reminds me of this map that made the cover of the New Yorker a long time ago:
[http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/newyorker2.JP...](http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/02/newyorker2.JPG)

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xianshou
A shame this came out too late to be added to XKCD's "Map Projections" comic.
I'd call it the "Manhattan Uzbekistan Projection."

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fishtoaster
If I understand map projections correctly _, isn't this just whatever
projection google maps uses (Mercator) with an overlay?

_ I probably don't really.

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kilovoltaire
Yes this is definitely just Mercator. But you could reproject in a Manhattan-
relative way, such that this larger grid actually looks like a grid (just like
latitude and longitude do in Mercator) and that might be a... pointless new
projection.

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Bobby_Tables
This doesn't make a lot of sense for Manhattan, because the grid doesn't have
a center point; there's no numbering convention for streets south of Houston
or avenues east of York/A. It would make more sense for cities like Miami or
Salt Lake City, where there is a quadrant system and (for the most part)
consistent spacing of streets

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rquantz
Yes, but Miami and Salt Lake City aren't the center of the world.

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podopie
I don't think the grid is completely correct in Manhattan, even where the grid
exists. It puts Washington Square Park , which southern end should be 4th
street, as 6th street, and on the northern end of the grid, George Washington
Bridge, which comes into Manhattan at 175th (I believe), is marked at
180/181st.

This is a really cool map, but some minor adjustments and testing to get the
correct fit in Manhattan first would make a notable improvement in the overall
product. I'd say fitting goals would be Houston as 1st street, and maybe
191st-200s area for north bound (Bronx continues the pattern, but it's much
less consistent). Good work!

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theYipster
Man, and to think my friend's 5th floor walk-up in a little building on 1st
and 1st would truly be the center of the universe.

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alanfalcon
One of my cross-streets is 13337th Ave. That's like an order of magnitude
better than being just on 1337th Ave., right?

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vasi
Wow, it lines up almost perfectly with Montreal's rather askew grid, what a
coincidence.

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nobody31415926
No it's a conspiracy - I'm just not sure what kind

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blehn
This just goes to show that 1st and 1st really _is_ the center of the universe

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gecko
The Chicago grid actually _does_ extend well into Indiana, and its numbering
system makes slightly more sense. It'd be nice to have a version of this for
the Second City.

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beerglass
Oh, why did you do it? Real estate developers in Bangalore have already
started quoting higher prices by labeling the NY address to local properties
:(

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chris_gogreen
What is this?

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nobody31415926
Assuming you aren't a troll.

Manhattan - like most US cities have streets/avenues based on a regular grid
and numbered consecutively Streets East/West and Avenues North/South.

So you can continue the numbering scheme across the entire world. The angles
are due to the fact that the streets are aligned with the island of Manhattan
rather than geographic north.

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keithpeter
I live in a city with a street plan defined by an irrigation ditch cut around
1300AD and a market place that was active 1150 AD or so. Other places nearby
have main streets surveyed originally by the Romans.

I suspect this was not a troll.

Greetings from very near 10137Ave, 62586st, bluenose territory.

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arethuza
The original main street in _this_ city was pretty much defined by the 12,000
year old glaciated tail behind the crag of a 350 million year old volcano. :-)

7920Ave, 62638St

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flyingdutchman
Maybe this will help Herman Cain.

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frisco
I love the Uzbekistan conspiracy.

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juiceandjuice
Salt Lake City/valley has a better grid system, just saying. I dearly miss it.

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fryguy
Sure, just turn left on N 400 W. Took me a while to get used to when I stayed
there for a summer.

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scott_s
Okay, cute, but the "Manhattan Grid" barely extends to lower Manhattan.

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bambax
I live at the corner of 64,779 St and 12,785 Ave.

