AKA Abraham Bacoln

Hey, NOLA people and people interested in NOLA:

As you well know this city is a crazy bundle of crossed-up mishmash streets that start and end in unlikely places and probably drive the cartographers mad. I know it’s frustrating to me to make four right turns and not end up where I started. I spend a lot of time driving around New Orleans looking for things to take pictures of. When I’m out I usually know where I am, streets-wise, but have no idea where I am, neighborhoods-wise. That’s because the “official” NOLA neighborhoods have borders that could be defined as anything but regular.

Fortunately, the GNOCDC (Greater New Orleans Community Data Center) has this under control. They publish a map of neighborhood boundaries [link, .PDF] and that is pretty darned cool as well as helpful. My complaint here, though, is that the map itself doesn’t have any street names which can make it hard for me to ascertain exactly where I was, or where one neighborhood changes to the next. Likewise a PDF is not the easiest thing to scroll, zoom, or otherwise navigate.

Thank goodness for this day and age of do-it-yourselfness and the companies (and their applications) that help you out in this endeavor. I took some time to lay out the neighborhoods in Google Maps, as seen below:

View New Orleans neighborhood boundaries in a larger map

Hopefully some of you will find this helpful – the ability to zoom in and out, see street names, and so forth. Each neighborhood on the map has a link back to the GNOCDC’s community snapshot for that neighborhood. I realize that I’m linking to pre-Katrina data, but the point is to inform oneself of the neighborhood and its history, not the most up-to-date population count.

I hope you find it useful, entertaining, or both.

[caveats: I realize some of my borders are not perfect down to the foot – when one has to click every single corner of a polygon for 55 different neighborhoods one tends to be less than pixel-perfect. Also I did not do the neighborhoods on the West Bank or in New Orleans East because some of them cover many square miles of empty-ish space that I did not feel like tracing. Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back and fill them in but don’t hold your breath]

Also if you ever want to get straight to the map without visiting this blog just bookmark that there link.

VERY helpful, actually. Erm…not that I would expect anything of yours NOT to be…

Comment by Marc P January 20, 2010 @ 10:32 pm

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cool.

Comment by liz January 21, 2010 @ 12:29 pm

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Nice! I’ve been asked about this kind of thing and came up with a similar utility:

http://crimewatchneworleans.org/where/

Enter an address in the form and you’ll be shown what neighborhood, council district, police district, ward and zipcode that address lies in. For example:

http://crimewatchneworleans.org/where/perdido-st/900

Click on the area names to see an outline of that particular region.

Comment by rcs June 10, 2010 @ 8:00 pm

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