Drinking Starbucks on the Hudson, Going to Work in Brooklyn

Anyone who visits Manhattan comes away with the impression that it is a very, very compressed urban area. But how compressed it really was I was unaware until I actually went there in person. So after I got back home I tried a simple little project.

I set two Google Maps to the same scale, with my home neighborhood in one (my house being at its center) and Midtown Manhattan in the other (and the Marriott Marquis hotel I stayed at in its center). I then superimposed one map onto the other, the two maps' centers aligned as well as the cardinal directions. The results were revealing to me, to say the least.

--Rockefeller Center would be at the entrance to my humble little subdivision onto NW 34th Street (Gainesville grid).

--The NE corner of my neighborhood running course would be precisely at that traffic circle (containing the beautiful giant globe) at the SW corner of Central Park.

--I'm sitting in the Magnolia Parke Starbucks writing this. But were I in the corresponding point in Manhattan, I wouldn't actually be in Manhattan: I would be "sitting" in the middle of the Hudson River halfway between 14th Avenue on the east side and Hoboken, New Jersey on the west. And this Starbucks is within walking distance of my house.

--The Empire State Building and Macy's would lie in the subdivision just south of my extremely close YMCA.

--The Williamsburg Bridge to Brooklyn would begin right at the Solar Walk, an outdoors planetarium running along Gainesville's 8th Avenue. It would then head toward the UF campus as it approached the Brooklyn side.

--New York's Chinatown roughly corresponds to Gainesville's Westside Park, which is located near the Solar Walk.

--Gainesville's Oaks Mall (our big shopping mall) would be in Paulus Hook, New Jersey.

--My workplace, situated on the southern end of Gainesville, corresponds to an area in western Brooklyn, near 2nd Avenue and 9th Street ( a few blocks from the end of the Brooklyn Bridge).

Superimposing maps is a cool idea that can also be used to compare the relative sizes of political entities from various distant parts of the world . I'll be using it from time to time in the future.