Friday, September 04, 2015

Mapbox's map of DC neighborhoods - including Bloomingdale

Click on the link to read the entire CityLab article.

I have included the section that mentions Bloomingdale.


How Many Neighborhoods Is Too Many for One Map?

The lead cartographer for Mapbox answers the technological and philosophical questions of which ‘hoods make it onto a map.
Washington, D.C., has got too many neighborhoods. The city’s Office of Planning recognizes 131 distinct neighborhoods and even acknowledges that the list is, at best, incomplete. Residents of the District love nothing more than arguing over where Eckington ends and Bloomingdale begins (or LeDroit Park or Truxton Circle or Shaw, for that matter).
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Neighborhoods in D.C. are often small and obscure: Swampoodle, for example, or the nexus of LeDroit Park/Bloomingdale/Shaw/Truxton Circle/Eckington. Who makes the call?
D.C.'s neighborhood boundaries are available from the government on their open data portal.  As far as I know, the boundaries are only an approximate reference and have no official definition or purpose.  And in reality, the boundaries of many neighborhoods are quite fuzzy, and there are many areas of the city that could reasonably fall into two or more neighborhoods.
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You will note that the teeny triangle bounded by Florida NW, Rhode Island Avenue NW and 2nd Street NW appears to be part of LeDroit Park and not Bloomingdale. 

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