Maps of San Francisco

8-Bit San Francisco

You probably saw Google’s April Fool’s Day maps project yesterday, in which they made the world look like 1980s Nintendo games. But did you know that you can see certain cities built in a labor of love in the same style, funded via a Kickstarter project nearly two years ago?

Google’s version (2012):

The 8-Bit Cities version (est. 2010/2011):

Click through to explore more of the 8-bit world on either site.

Meat Map

Uptown Almanac spots a perfect storm of Things San Francisco Loves: Maps of itself and meat.

As long as it’s grass-fed, sustainably raised meat, that is. Sadly, according to the Uptown commenters, it will not be a fancy-pants butcher shop to compete with the Lo Cost Meat Market already serving the neighborhood there.

Alternate Reality BART Map

Jake Coolidge made this map of the ideal BART system, based in part off 1950s-era plans for the system. He says of the plan map he studied:

Published in 1956, 16 years before the system first went into operation, the plan seemed to me, at the time, to capture a sense of unbridled optimism. The massive region-wide system of modern trains, depicted in well-designed maps and with stylish illustrations, embodied a confidence in technology to shape the rapidly changing post-war city.

Click through for the whole thing. This is a clean, well-designed transit map of what could have been a massive regional transit system.

(Jake Coolidge)

Tennis Maps of San Francisco

I cheated. There’s a database in here that doesn’t have a map. But it’s useful to sort by which courts have lights.

What are you waiting for? Go find a court and play some tennis.

And let me know if you need a partner.

How Much Did Your Landlord Pay for the Building?

The Planning Department put all its information online in a slick searchable, mappable interface. You can look up how much your property last sold for, the value of renovations, all permits issued for the property, whether you live in a historic resource, the zoning, and many other nifty little details.

An architectural historian friend told me that this information all used to be in an old DOS machine in the lobby of the Planning Department. Now, it’s all online, making her job easier, and our lives more interesting.

Available here.

AirBnB’s San Francisco Listing Growth

Airbnb has grown fast and big since they began, in 2008. These pretty pink maps from Stamen Design show the frequency of listings in San Francisco at the beginning (top), and more recently (bottom).

Click through for more intermediate stages.

(Source: stamen.com)

Historic Aerial Photos of San Francisco

The waterfront, the Mission, and Buena Vista Park as seen in high-resolution photos recently added to the David Rumsey Map Collection. The set totals 164 photos, all from the San Francisco Public Library, which the online collection has scanned, indexed, and made available to the public online.

The photos were taken in the 1930s and show remarkable detail.

Crimespotting San Francisco

Pretty sure that the crime data is one of the most frequently visualized data sets from datasf.org.

This one, by Stamen Design, highlights clusters of activity, lets you toggle time periods and day/night, and has all kinds of other nifty sorting features.

Lit Map of San Francisco

San Francisco has long captured the imagination of literary types. This collection of quotes about the city originated as an art piece in the Chronicle, and was detailed further by Strange Maps.