April 2012

I still love New York City street fairs, and I still find these maps very handy for getting my weekly dose, so I wanted to make one for 2012.

There’s a lot of work involved in collating the dates and locations from several web sites, and there’s no straightforward way around that. But I was hoping to at least automate the process of mapping that data. I looked around at several different systems for doing this and concluded that Google Fusion Tables would be the best tool. It comes in two tiers: simple UI platform and more a complex and powerful API platform. Unfortunately, I concluded that a) automating this project from table to map would require using the API and b) the API is somewhat beyond my humble coding skills.

So instead I took my very wise partner’s advice and just updated last year’s map, line by line. It proved to be easier than I had feared, and here’s the result.

Full Google My Map with event listings in chronological order

As with last year’s map, this includes every fair in Manhattan (only) that I could discover, including those from the three main producers plus Taste of Tribeca, Gay Pride, the BBQ Block Party, and more. It’s a collaborative map, so if you know of other festivals or want to add street fairs from other boroughs, be my guest.

All the fairs are color coded by month. Click through the link beneath the map to visit the My Map page, where a sidebar shows all the fairs in chronological order. The map is useful not only to find NYC street fairs, but also to avoid the crowds and traffic–which is what my partner mostly uses it for.