Figuring out which city neighborhood you're in (and a lot more)
When your city has more than 225 neighborhoods, it's not easy to eye up a home or business and know for certain which one it's in. Back in the day, you'd have to get your hands on a Baltimore neighborhoods map and scrutinize the boundaries.
Life was so hard before the Internet.
The city government's Baltimore City iMap site has for a while now popped out the answer about a neighborhood when you plug in an address. It takes a little while -- you can almost hear the gears grinding -- but hey, it beat the hard-copy alternative.
Now, though, the city is transitioning to Baltimore CityView, a quicker neighborhood look-up that also offers other sorts of answers. The closest farmers' markets, for instance, or the median household income. You can export what you find to a spreadsheet.
Hat tip to Sun restaurant critic Richard Gorelick for noticing this update.
Categories: Neighborhood and neighbors
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Comments
This is a great service! I love that it plots out the property lines, too. Thanks for sharing, Jamie!
Posted by: pigtown design | August 1, 2011 9:14 AM
great idea, glad to see the city doing something innovative like this.
Posted by: chappy10 | August 1, 2011 11:58 AM
As journalists and community development folks all know, neighborhood names are tricky. No one source will make every city official, neighborhood activist, and association leader happy.
That said, I'd like to suggest that for most practical purposes, LiveBaltimore's map (downloadable by PDF) is better than the city source.
Why? My own neighborhood is a great example. In the early part of the last decade, "Baltimore Linwood" filed official paperwork with the city to change its name to "Patterson Park." That paperwork was accepted and the name officially changed in the city's eyes (i.e. Mayoral correspondence comes to "Patterson Park," not "Baltimore Linwood."
But the city map and the web app still say "Baltimore Linwood." Ask the Planning office and they will say that they are maintaining the old name for consistency of statistical reporting. That's fine for that purpose, but what that means is that the map does not represent present tense reality from the perspective of elected leaders of neighborhood residents.
You see the same thing in lots of places where neighborhoods have merged into other neighborhoods, i.e. Christopher in Northeast Baltimore now being a part of Hamilton Hills (still represented on the map as Harford Echodale Perring" or some such).
The LiveBaltimore map isn't perfect but it comes closest of all to representing present tense reality. Ideally, the city would publish a companion map that reflects current official names for identification purposes to compliment the existing map where neighborhood names are etched in stone for statistical aggregation purposes.
Meanwhile, LiveBaltimore's map is here: http://www.livebaltimore.com/UploadedFiles/neighborhoods/region/Neighborhood%20Map%20Feb.%202010.pdf
Cheers, Mark
Posted by: Mark Tough | August 21, 2011 7:10 PM
Good point, Mark! The maps we run with the housing-market trends story every six months draw on the official city boundaries and names. But in some cases -- "Baltimore-Linwood" being one of them -- it's decidedly old news.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | August 21, 2011 7:28 PM