Detroit's Deadliest Days

50 years ago, in July 1967, a riot broke out in Detroit which lasted five days. By the time the riot ended 43 people were dead, 1,189 were injured, over 7,200 people had been arrested and more than 2,000 buildings had been destroyed.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Detroit Riot the Detroit News has released a map exploring every single one of the 43 deaths that occurred during the riot. The map doesn't attempt to explain the causes of the riot or how it progressed. It just attempts to explain who died, where they died and how.

Five Deadly Days in Detroit uses Carto's Odyssey.js story map format to provide a simple chronological account of what happened in Detroit. The basemap used for the story map is a United States Geological Survey map from 1968. As you scroll through Five Deadly Days in Detroit the map pans to the location where one of the 43 people were killed. The text beneath the map provides an account of who died and how they were killed. This text is illustrated with vintage images from the Detroit News coverage of the riot in 1967.

The Manhattan Skyscraper Explorer

New York is a city of amazing tall buildings. But what do you actually know about Manhattan's tallest buildings? Do you know how tall they are or when they were built? Do you know what each building is used for? To find out the answer to these questions you need the Manhattan Skyscraper Explorer

The Manhattan Skyscraper Explorer is your guide to Manhattan's tallest building. This 3d Esri map allows you to explore the amazing New York skyline and find out everything you would ever need to know about the city's buildings. The 3d map is accompanied by a timeline - height chart, which allows you to explore Manhattan's skyscrapers by year of construction and by building height.

If you select an individual building on the map you can learn more about the chosen skyscraper, such as its height and the year it was built. You can even view an image gallery of the building and (where available) click through to learn more about the building on Wikipedia.

Help Geotag New York's History

You can now help the New York Public Library geotag its collection of vintage photographs of New York City. The NYPL's new Surveyor map is a citizen science project designed to hep the library index its collections of historical photographs by location.

Visit the new Surveyor website and you will be shown a vintage photograph from the NYPL collection. All you have to do is show the location depicted in the photo by clicking on the interactive map. Luckily many of the photographs have an address in the photo's title or associated data. This makes the task relatively easy, even if you don't know New York very well.

You also don't need to worry about not knowing the location shown in a photo. If this is the case you just need to press the 'skip' button to move on to the next photo.

Many of the photos in the NYPL's Digital Collections are in the public domain. This means that you will be able to use many of the photos that you geotag in your own interactive maps. Just like OldNYC has done with its interactive map of 40,000 vintage photos of New York from the NYPL’s photo collections.

The Musical Map of New Orleans

New Orleans is well known for its incredibly rich musical history. You can now explore this history by taking one of a number of guided mapped tours of the city. The maps were created by New Orleans community radio station WWOZ.

A Closer Walk currently includes nine interactive mapped walks of New Orleans, each one exploring a different aspect of the city's musical history. The tours themselves are simple interactive maps with numbered markers indicating places in the city on the tour. Behind these simple maps however is a rich and detailed database of New Orleans' music venues and locations important to the city's musical heritage and history.

Click through on the interactive maps and you can discover all about these venues and locations around New Orleans. This includes a detailed introduction to the selected venue / location, links to websites, videos from the location, photos and audio clips. Music fans in particular will enjoy the associated video and audio clips provided for each location featured in A Closer Walk.

You can view a map of all the curated venues and locations by switching to the 'View Map' in the Places section of A Closer Walk.

Pollen & Pollution Mapping

The Natural Resources Defense Council has released an interactive Air Quality map of the United States. The map shows the number of days when the concentration of ozone exceeds safe levels. The map also shows areas which suffer from high levels of ragweed pollen.

You can use the map to see the historical tendency for both high ozone and pollen levels at your location. The map also includes a layer which shows areas which suffer from both high levels of smog and high levels of pollen. The combined effect of high ozone and pollen levels can be particularly dangerous for asthma sufferers

If you select a state on the map you can view the percentage of the population living in counties reported to have ragweed and unhealthy smog days. You can also view the number of adults and children who suffer from asthma in the state.

Pride Comes Before a Ball

Carto has completed an interesting geo-data investigation into where people go after taking part in New York's Pride parade. A Map of Where People Went After the NYC Pride Parade uses pick-up and drop-off data from New York's yellow taxis to determine what people do after Pride.

Using data from Sunday June 26th, 2016 (the data of last year's Pride in New York) Carto isolated all the taxi pick-ups in the Pride parade area between 4-8pm (when the parade was winding down). They then created a map of all the drop-off points from these pick-ups, to see where people were going after Pride. Carto used a DBSCAN clustering algorithm to identify locations with a high density of drop-offs.

Major transit hubs feature quite prominently, presumably for people heading home, Areas with popular gay bars also appeared to be popular destinations. Locations around hotels is another take out from the mapped data.

If you enjoyed this visualization of NYC taxi data then you will probably also like NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life. Chris Whong's NYC Taxis: A Day in the Life is a must for anyone interested in the visualization of transit data.

Your Town's Pride Route Map

Google has released a Pride search engine which can help you find the nearest upcoming Pride events happening near you. #ShowUp not only lists the dates of your nearest Pride events it can also show you a map of each march's route.

If you enter your location then #ShowUp will show you the nearest upcoming Pride events and the dates that they are happening. If you select an event you can even view the event's route on a Google Map. The route is of course displayed with an appropriately rainbow colored line.

If you missed your city's Pride event this year then you might be able to review the event from the #ShowUp home page. The home page features a number of 'Stories of Pride in America'. This allows you to select a Pride march that has already taken place. You can then view a Google Map of the Pride march which features videos and stories from people who took part in this year's event.

Has Your House Price Recovered?

Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies has released an interactive map which reveals where house prices in the United States have recovered to their turn of the century levels and where the housing market has yet to recover. How Much Have Home Prices Changed provides two map views. One compares current house prices to house prices in the year 2000. The other compares house prices now to their mid-2000's peak.

Much of the west coast has seen the best recovery in the housing market since 2000. For example properties in LA and San Francisco have both seen more than a 40% increase in value over their 2000 levels. However while real-estate in San Francisco has shown an increase above their prior peaks in the mid-2000's the property market in LA is still down on its peak level.

Across the whole USA only 15 percent of metro areas have recovered to pass their mid-2000's peak. For example, in much of Florida house prices are at least 26% down on their peak levels.

You can click on individual metro area on the map to view details on the price change since 2000 and the area's peak. You can also discover when the peak month was in the selected metro area.

Mapping the Mayflower Passengers

Nearly 400 years ago 102 passengers and about 30 crew members set sail from Plymouth, on a ship called the Mayflower, to begin a new life in the new world.

The Mayflower 400 map shows the places of origin (where known) of the Mayflower's passengers and crew. You can click on the markers on the map to learn more about each individual, including the place & date of their birth & death. The colors of the markers indicate whether the individual shown was a religious Pilgrim, a paying passenger or a member of the crew.

There doesn't seem to be anything particularly interesting in the geographical distribution of the birthplaces of the passengers and crew. One thing noticeable is that none of them were from the far north or the south-west of England.

It would also be really interesting to view a map showing where the descendants of the Mayflower Pilgrims now live. According to Wikipedia 31 of the passengers are known to have descendants. The Mayflower Society claim that those 31 now they have over ten million descendants.

The US HIV Map

AIDSVu is an interactive map illustrating the prevalence of HIV in the United States. The map shows the overall prevalence of HIV down to the county level in U.S. states. The data for the map comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) national HIV surveillance database and from state, county and city health departments.

The AIDSVu interactive map shows the prevalence of HIV at the county level. The data can be explored to view maps of HIV prevalence in different age ranges and by race and sex. It also includes the option to compare HIV prevalence side-by-side with maps of poverty levels, high school education, median household income, income inequality and numbers of people without health insurance.

As well as visualizing trends in the prevalence of HIV in the United States AIDSVu can also show you the location of critical resources. These include HIV testing centers, HIV treatment centers, and NIH-Funded HIV Prevention & Vaccine Trials Sites.

Fried Chicken Route Planners

A Fried Chicken Route Planner is a variation on the much loved Pub crawl route planning map. Instead of creating a pub crawl route around a number of pubs or bars the Fried Chicken Route Planner creates a mapped route taking in some of the best fried chicken restaurants.

A good example of a Fried Chicken Route Planner is the Post & Courier's Backroads Fried Chicken map (in fact it might be the only example of a Fried Chicken Route Planner). The Backroads Fried Chicken map can provide a route from any address in South Carolina to 17 of the best fried chicken restaurants in the state.

The 17 fried chicken restaurants on your route have all been chosen by the Post & Courier's food critic Hanna Raskin. As you progress through the route you can view the address and opening hours of each individual restaurant. If stopping and eating at 17 different fried chicken restaurants in one car journey strikes you as being a bit too self-indulgent then you might want to restrict yourself to eating at Hanna's pick of the top five restaurants. These are listed and reviewed below the map.

Free Eclipse Glasses

The STAR Library Education Network (STAR_Net) has developed this map as an addition to its Eclipse Resource Center. Credit: NASA@ My Library initiative and the Moore Foundation.

It is now less than 8 weeks to the solar eclipse. You can experience the total eclipse anywhere along a narrow band stretching from Oregon to South Carolina.

If you are planning to view the eclipse then you will need a pair of eclipse glasses. Thanks to the Space Science Institute (SSI) and the generous sponsorship of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Research Corporation and Google, two million pairs of free eclipse glasses are being given away by participating libraries across the United States.

There are over 2,000 participating libraries. You can find your closest on the Participating Eclipse Libraries interactive map. The participating libraries will also have eclipse background information for anybody who wants to learn more about the astronomy of solar eclipses.


If you are still planning where to view the eclipse on August 21st then you might want to consult NOAA's Cloudiness Map of the Eclipse. The map not only shows you where you can see a total eclipse (the umbral path) but also tells you the chance of clouds along the eclipse's path, based on historical weather data.

The map includes a number of circles which are colored based on the chance of cloud cover. If you click on these circles you can view the percentage chance of having an unobstructed view of the eclipse (based on the amount of cloud cover at that location on August 21st in previous years).

Judging by the map Nebraska, Wyoming and Idaho are the states where you will have the best chance of an unobstructed view. However these states are not the best places to view the eclipse in terms of duration. If you want to experience the eclipse with the longest duration you need to be near Carbondale in Illinois, where the sun will be completely obscured for two minutes and 40 seconds.

NASA's Total Solar Eclipse Interactive Map also shows the path of the eclipse across the United States. NASA's map doesn't include information about the likelihood of cloud cover but it does allow you to find out the duration of totality (how long the sun will be obscured) anywhere along the eclipse's path. Just click anywhere on the map to discover the time of the eclipse at that location, how much of the sun will be obscured and how long the eclipse will last.

City Cycling Stress Scores

Moovel Lab's What the Street? provides an interesting analysis of how much space is dedicated to cars, to cycling and to trains in cities around the world. According to What the Street cyclists in most cities around the world can typically expect much less than ten percent of the physical space that is dedicated to cars.

The quality of a city's cycling network however is far more than just a reflection of the amount of physical space dedicated to bikes. It also relies on how well a cycling network connects people to the places that they want to go and to the levels of stress that they experience while on their bikes. PlacesForBikes has therefore carried out a detailed analysis of local bike networks across the United States and ranked its towns and cities on how good they are for cycling.

The PlacesForBikes Bicycle Network Analysis allows you to view the results of this cycling network census in 299 towns and cities. You can view an interactive map for each town and city. The maps show the selected city's street colored according to their cycling stress score. Each map also includes the town or city's overall Bicycle Network Analysis score and individual scores for how easy it is for the population to access different places (e.g. parks, stores and health services) by bike.

You can read more about how the Bicycle Network Analysis scores are calculated on the PlacesForBikes Methodology page. The methodology partly relies on how streets are tagged on OpenStreetMap in terms of the roadway characteristics important to bikes and cyclists.

Trump's Huge Conflict of Interest Map

So many people ask me this. They ask me where does the president have great conflict of interests. I tell them Donald Trump has the best conflicts of interest. The corruption is big. I never realized how big it was. I really just see the bigness of it all.

You know Obama worked on it for years, got zippo, zero. Me, the people just call me up, they say, ‘Donald, can we just give you the money?’ I say, ‘Absolutely, yes.’ But some people don't get it. They don't want to give you the money. In which case they're very, very stupid people. Sad.

Here, you can take this, that's the final map of the numbers. It's pretty good, right? It's called the Trump’s Conflicts of Interest map. The black is obviously us. There's some countries you can't break through, you can't. It's sad. You can't. There is a chance that we could end up having a major, major conflict with them. But forget them. Have you seen all the black countries on the map. That's a tremendous success ... That's another thing that nobody talks about. The success. So much success.

Take that Qaddafi. I dealt with Qaddafi. I rented him a piece of land. He paid me more for one night than the land was worth for two years, and then I didn't let him use the land. That's what we should be doing. I screwed him. But nobody wants to talk about that.

From the World to MIT

Students travel from countries across the world in order to study at MIT. This year nearly a quarter of MIT's overseas students come from China. India sends the next largest number of students to study at the university.

MIT World is a new interactive map from MIT Senseable City Lab that visualizes the countries MIT students have come from over the last twenty years. The map provides a choropleth layer which provides an overview of the numbers of students from each country. A bar graph beneath the map provides a breakdown of the number of students traveling from each country.

The map also uses (not entirely necessary) flow lines joining each country with MIT in the USA. If you want to create a flowmap yourself then you might find Sarah Bellum's Canvas Flowmap Layer for the ArcGIS JavaScript API library or the Leaflet.Canvas-Flowmap-Layer for Leaflet.js useful.

Uber and Lyft in San Francisco

In the Fall of 2016, on an average Friday, Uber and Lyft made more than 200,000 journeys. A new data visualization, Uber and Lyft in San Francisco, allows you to explore the combined usage of Lyft and Uber in San Francisco during Fall 2016 on an interactive map.

The map shows in which areas of the city the two ride-share services are used the most. You can explore the data by day of the week and by hour of the day. You can also filter the data by pick-ups and drop-offs. The volume of pick-ups and drop-offs is shown on the map with a traditional choropleth view of the data. You can however switch to a 3D view in which the data is also extruded to show the volume of Uber and Lyft usage by height.

The choropleth layer is divided into Transportation Analysis Zones. In effect these are individual city blocks in the downtown area and slightly larger groups of blocks outside of the downtown area. You can click on these individual zones to view bar graphs of the hourly volume of pick-ups and drop-offs and the total for the whole day.

Street View Cars for Science

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has teamed up with Google to use Google Maps Street View cars to measure air quality. Google's Street View cars were equipped with sensors to measure nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide and black carbon as they drove the streets capturing the panoramic Street View imagery for Google Maps.

You can read more about the experiment on EDF's article, Mapping Air Pollution with New Sensors. The article includes a Google Map of the results from testing the air quality in Oakland, California. The map provides three heat map views of Oakland's streets showing where the Street View cars found the highest levels of nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide and black carbon.

The map also includes a number of information markers to indicate spots around Oakland with pockets of high pollution. If you select these markers you can read the EDF researchers' explanation of what local causes contribute to the high pollution at this location.


This isn't the first time that Google has teamed up with EDF to use Street View cars as measuring tools. In 2014 Google teamed up with the Environmental Defense Fund to equip Street View cars with air-quality sensors to detect natural gas leaks from utility pipes under city streets. Using the data collected by the Street View cars Google and EDF then created detailed maps showing where gas leaks were found and where gas pipes need to be fixed or replaced.

In July 2014 the EDF released maps from the experiment in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. The maps revealed that Boston and New York's ageing utility pipes result in a large number of leaks, while Philadelphia's newer gas pipe network is responsible for far fewer leaks.

Google also used their specially equipped Street View cars to map out more than 1,000 miles of roads in Inglewood, Chino and Pasadena. You can see the results of these test drives in the EDF's Los Angeles Area: Snapshot of Natural Gas Leaks map. The data gathered revealed an average of about one leak for every four miles driven in Pasadena, one leak for every five miles in Inglewood and one leak for every five miles in Chino.

New Google Map of Lynchings

Between 1877 and 1950 more than 4,000 African Americans were lynched in the United States. The Equal Justice Initiative has collaborated with Google to launch an in-depth examination of this terrible episode in American history. A Lynching in America includes interviews, audio recordings and reports into the history of lynchings in the United States. It also includes an interactive map documenting reported lynchings across the country.

Individual counties are colored on the map by the reported number of lynchings in the county. You can also hover over individual states on the map to view the total number of lynchings reported in the whole state. The white dots on the map provide links to harrowing narrated tales of lynchings against individual African Americans.

A Lynching in America uses data from the Equal Justice Initiative's report 'Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror', based on extensive research into the period between the Civil War and World War II.


During the 1890's mobs of white men killed around 9 people per month. Monroe Work Today also has an interactive map of lynchings in the United States. The Monroe Work Today map shows where lynchings took place from 1835 to 1964. The map plots the locations of incidents of white mob violence across the whole of the country. Different colored markers on the map indicate whether the victims of this violence were black, Chinese, Native American or other groups of Americans.

You can select individual markers on the map to learn more about each individual instance of white mob violence. Each instance also includes links to the sources for the mapped lynching. A timeline at the bottom of the map plots the number of lynchings over time. This timeline is interactive and can be used to filter the lynchings shown on the map by any date range.

The data for the map builds on the research of the black sociologist Monroe Nathan Work, who published biannual lynching reports at the beginning of the 20th century. His reports have been enhanced and referenced with more modern research. Alongside the interactive map Monroe Work Today provides a detailed look at the life and work of Monroe Work and the history of white mob violence in the United States.

New York in 3D

You can explore New York in glorious 3D on Cesium. In New York City Cesium uses NYC DoITT's 3D Building Massing Model of New York City to help to bring the city alive.

NYC DoITT's 3D building model was created from a 2014 aerial survey of the city. The building models include detailed pitched roofs and roof appendages such as chimneys, parapets and spindles. If you want to use the 3D buildings in your own maps you can download the building massing model in the CityGML format from the NYC.gov website.


NYC DoITT's 3D Building Massing Model was also used in the New York Times' Mapping the Shadows of New York City. This beautiful map shows the extent that the city's tall buildings block the sun throughout the year.

The Times says that most Manhattan neighborhoods remain in shadow for at least half of the day. They also claim that the amount of time a location spends in shadow during daylight hours can affect everything from apartment rental prices to the flow of foot traffic on the city's streets.

To calculate the extent of building shadows in winter, summer, spring and fall the NYT worked with the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University to calculate the total number of minutes that a given point spends in shadow over the course of a day, based on the height and location of nearby buildings.

American Cargo Mapping

The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) has released its 2017 Infrastructure Report Card. This detailed report awards grades to individual infrastructure sectors based on criteria such as Condition, Funding and Operation & Maintenance.

You can explore the grades awarded to the United States cargo transportation infrastructure on a new Esri story map. The Transportation Infrastructure: Interactive Map Viewer examines the state of America's transportation network which is used to move cargo into and around the country. The map looks in turn at the state of America's roads, bridges, railways, ports and airports and examines their capacity to transport the country's cargo.

For example the section on the interstate network examines the volume of truck traffic on the country's roads, where interstates are in a poor condition and the top ten trucking choke points on the interstate network.