New York

Just trying to get some idea of how New York works. This is a very random mish-mash of notes and links, from which i will attempt to assemble a psychogeographical gestalt. The idea is to first establish a general geographical orientation, then to take simultaneous bottom-up (reading about individual places) and top-down (looking at the history of the growth of the city, looking at the overall structure of the trunk roads and railways) approaches to put flesh on the geographical skeleton.

Framework

I need an outline map of the whole city, a specification of how the Manhattan grid system works, that sort of thing.

The Google Maps vs NYC Subway thing is pretty neat.

History and geography of neighbourhoods:

• Manhattan neighbourhoods. They have maps of the other boroughs too, but not in so much detail.
• Another neighbourhood map, this one more authoritative and complete.

Places

• Washington Heights and Inwood - where Columbia University health sciences campus is; they claim it's a 'vibrant neighbourhood' in northern Manhattan. Sounds pretty dull to me.
• Upper West Side - the northern extent (from where?) of the western side of Manhattan island; fairly unremarkable before 1900, but with the opening of the IRT Broadway lin in 1904, and the changes in planning rules allowing taller tower blocks in 1901, the trend amongst the bourgeoise towards living in flats ('apartments') rather than houses drove extreme gentrification.
• 8th Street - once seen as the division between uptown and downtown; why not any more?

Links

• "How to Live the Good Life in New York" - an irritatingly-named but apparently useful book.
• A list of links about Living and Working in New York City.
• A list of New York City Independent Bookstores; it would be interesting to plot the location of all these, to see if clusters of cultural stuff emerge; should be fairly easy as a google maps hack.
• A guide to the best burgers in New York.
• Little bit of history of the five boroughs.
• More history.
• Wikipedia probably has stuff worth reading.
• Another list of links.