# Methodology and sources

## What this is

A planner for day trips within New York City. You choose your home neighborhood
(and, optionally, what you are in the mood for) and the app proposes other
neighborhoods to visit, each with a short itinerary of where to eat, what to see
and what to do. The "I'm feeling lucky" button sends you to one neighborhood at
random.

Everything runs in the browser from a single curated data file. There is no
server, no login and no tracking.

## The neighborhood set

The dataset covers **77 neighborhoods** chosen for broad geographic spread across
all five boroughs:

| Borough | Neighborhoods |
| --- | --- |
| Manhattan | 21 |
| Brooklyn | 21 |
| Queens | 16 |
| Bronx | 11 |
| Staten Island | 8 |

The split roughly tracks where the city's cultural and dining density
sits while making sure every borough — including Staten Island and the Bronx,
which are often left off tourist maps — is represented. Each
neighborhood carries four to six highlights, for **375 places in total**.

## The five categories

Every highlight is tagged with one of five categories so the planner can balance
an itinerary and respond to your mood filters:

- **Eat** — restaurants, food halls, markets, bakeries, breweries
- **See** — museums, cultural institutions, historic sites
- **Arts** — performance and arts venues, galleries
- **Architecture** — notable buildings, streetscapes, historic districts
- **Outdoors** — parks, waterfront, gardens, beaches

## How places were chosen

Curation is editorial. Candidates were drawn from a wide range of public
listings and reference sources, including:

- **New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission** designations (individual
  landmarks and historic districts) for the architecture picks
- **NYC Parks** and **National Park Service** (Gateway National Recreation Area)
  listings for parks, beaches and waterfront sites
- Museum and cultural-institution rosters from the city's major networks
  (for example the Wildlife Conservation Society for the zoo and aquarium, and
  the institutions of Museum Mile)
- Long-established, widely documented restaurants and food markets — places with
  decades of public history rather than this season's openings
- General reference and local-knowledge sources (neighborhood histories, borough
  tourism material, and well-documented cultural geography such as the Bronx as
  the birthplace of hip-hop or Jackson Heights as one of the most diverse places
  in the country)
- **[The Neighborhoods Project](https://theneighborhoods.substack.com/) by Rob
  Stephenson** — a photographer's ongoing project to document every New York City
  neighborhood. It informed both the breadth of our coverage (a reminder of how
  many distinct neighborhoods the city holds beyond the obvious ones) and our
  sense of each place's character. With thanks and credit to Rob Stephenson.

The aim is a durable mix of famous places and local ones in each
neighborhood. The picks are not ranked.

## How the planner works

- **Distance** is the great-circle (straight-line) distance between neighborhood
  centers, shown in miles with a plain-language descriptor. It is not a transit
  time — actual travel depends on the subway and bus network.
- **Plan my day trips** returns three destinations. When you set a home
  neighborhood it favors trips to *other* boroughs (the point is discovery) while
  keeping at least one nearby option when one exists. Results are randomized, so
  pressing it again gives a fresh set.
- **I'm feeling lucky** picks one neighborhood at random from everything that is
  not your home and that matches any active mood filter.
- **Mood filters** narrow both which neighborhoods can be suggested and which
  stops fill each itinerary.

## Limitations

- **Coordinates are approximate.** Each pin is placed within the venue's block or
  building, accurate enough to find the neighborhood and the general spot, but not
  surveyed. Treat them as a guide, not a GPS fix.
- **This is a curated sample, not a directory.** Seventy-seven neighborhoods is a
  broad spread but still short of all ~300 named neighborhoods in the city, and
  four to six highlights cannot capture everything in a place.
- **Hours, prices and open/closed status are not tracked.** Always check before
  you go — beloved places do close (the Rubin Museum's gallery, for instance,
  closed in 2024 and now tours its collection).
- **No ratings or reviews.** Every provider that carries restaurant ratings
  charges for the data or forbids re-hosting it in a static page, so none are
  included.

## Editing the data

All content lives in `data/neighborhoods.json`. Each neighborhood has an `id`,
`name`, `borough`, a `center` coordinate, a `blurb`, and a list of `highlights`
(each with `name`, `cat`, `blurb` and a `coord`). Add a neighborhood or a
highlight by editing that file — no build step is required.