At 4 a.m. on a Wednesday, 1,289 of the 20,971 New York City places on this map are listed as open. By 1 p.m., 19,081 are.
Each point of light is a place whose hours someone has posted on OpenStreetMap, the volunteer-built map of the world: 8,700 restaurants, cafes and bakeries, 5,942 shops, 2,759 offices, banks, clinics and other services, 2,579 delis, groceries and pharmacies and 991 bars and clubs. It’s a sample, and an uneven one: in Brooklyn the map has about 42% as many food listings as the health department has inspected restaurants, and in the Bronx about 8%, so the Bronx looks darker than it is. Pick a day and time at the top of the map, or play the week.
The colors follow the light each kind of place gives off: fluorescent blue-white for delis, groceries and pharmacies, warm orange for restaurants, cafes and bakeries, pink neon for bars and clubs, yellow for shops and violet for offices, banks, clinics, gyms and galleries. A place glows while it's open and fades to a faint ember when it closes. Where many places sit close together, their light adds up.
The clock is always New York time, wherever you're reading from. Holiday closings are ignored, so this shows an ordinary week. Rules that apply only in some months, like summer hours, are applied for the month the data was pulled. Where a listing says a place is open late with no closing time ("17:00+"), it's counted as open for three hours. A rule after a semicolon replaces what came before it for those days; one after a comma adds to it. A fallback rule, after two bars ("||"), fills only the times the rules before it don't cover, which is how a store and the pharmacy inside it often end up in one listing. Hours that run past midnight are kept even when the next day has a line of its own, so “Fr 17:30-01:00; Sa 11:00-23:00” reads as open until 1 a.m. Saturday. OpenStreetMap’s specification, read strictly, would close that bar at midnight, though it calls that reading “probably not intended.” The rules are checked against worked examples in the project’s tests.
Not very, and not evenly. As a rough check, the map’s food listings were counted by borough and set against the restaurants and other food service establishments the health department inspected in the two years before the data was pulled. The map had about 42% as many in Brooklyn (2,838 against 6,790), 37% in Manhattan (3,890 against 10,448), 26% in Queens (1,536 against 5,999), 25% on Staten Island (243 against 958) and 8% in the Bronx (191 against 2,308). That’s a ratio of two counts, not a match rate: no listing was paired with an inspection record, and the map’s food group includes bakeries, coffee shops and candy stores the health department doesn’t always inspect. The calculation and its counts are published. A dark block can mean a closed block or an unmapped one.
What the map shows is the weekly pattern in these posted schedules. It isn’t a representative measure of what’s open across the city: coverage is uneven, listings go out of date and the choice of what counts as a place shapes the totals.
A refresh from OpenStreetMap is scheduled every Monday. To fix a wrong listing, edit it at openstreetmap.org; the change should appear here after the next successful refresh.