The Magnificent Maps of the Week

Last week's Maps of the Week round-up was dominated by vintage New York maps and animated weather maps. So I thought I;d shake-it up a bit with this week's Magnificent Maps of the Week, which features vintage maps of New York and animated weather maps.

I honestly hadn't intended to feature my own Gangs of New York map this week. However it does feature quite highly in the new Most Read Posts of the Week list (see the sidebar on the right), so who am I to argue.

The map recounts a famous 19th Century New York gang battle between members of the Dead Rabbits gang and the Bowery Boys, using an historical map and images from the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

I created the map using Leaflet.js and waypoints.js. Using waypoint.js with Leaflet allows you to trigger map interactions by browser scrolling. The result is that you simply need to scroll down the Gangs of New York map to progress through this retelling of the Dead Rabbits Riot.


Over the last month there has been some great examples of mapped visualizations of weather data. Weather-grid.GL is another great map visualization library, which works particularly well when displaying atmospheric data on an interactive map.

The Weather-grid.GL website explains how you can use the library to convert gridded data into LeafletJS WebGL overlays. The site also includes a link to the library's GitHub page and to a number of example maps created with the library.

This Intermountain West NDFD Grids with Leaflet WebGL map is probably the best example of the sort of impressive interactive weather map which can be created using the library. The map allows you to view temperature, RH, wind speed and precipitation layers on the map. With each layer you can cycle forward or back through the weather data in hourly increments and watch as the data updates almost instantaneously on the map.


Last year Jonathan Soma created a great mapped visualization of single men and women in the USA. The U.S. Singles Map shows the number of single men and women in metropolitan statistical areas (major cities and their suburbs), allowing you to adjust the results displayed on the map by age.

The map is great if you don't mind traveling halfway across the country in search of a partner - but not much use if you want to find a local date. Luckily Jonathan has got a bit more local with his latest two maps, showing where the singles live in New York City and San Francisco.

The NYC Singles Map shows singles men and women organized by zip-code and gender. The map reveals that in Manhattan there are far more young single women than men. So if you are female and aged between 20 and 34 and live in Manhattan your best bet is to commute out of the borough if you want to date someone of your own age.

If you are a young single woman in San Francisco then your luck is in. The Bay Area Singles Map shows that one result of the 'Google Shuttle Effect' is that the city is full of young single men. The situation in San Francisco only really changes when you move the age ranges to somewhere above the age of 50. Once you get to these age ranges most of the Bay Area shows a lot more single women, although much of San Francisco remains dominated by single men in this age range.