Where to find the happiest corner in NYC
New York City has long been deemed the grumpiest, rudest place on the planet, but one blog sought to find the city’s bright spots.
OneHappyBird conducted an informal study that identified New York’s “happy places” by analyzing positive and negative words within more than a half million geotagged tweets from 2011.
Using a grid of the city streets and avenues and the labMT word list, which includes a variety of words from “ecstasy” to “grief,” bloggers found west side neighborhoods to have a higher happiness level than their east side counterparts.
The happiest place in all of Manhattan, though, is, no surprise, attached to Central Park — along the western edge, which would be the intersection of 7th and 77th street, to be exact. That spot had the most tweets with words indicating happiness like “loves” and “sky” and less tweets with negative words like “fear,” “not,” and “no” — which leads us to ask how a tweet like “Loving the blue sky today. No fears about rain, not one cloud” might be categorized, but the bloggers acknowledge that the study isn’t scientifically sound.
Most of the city’s other happy spots also fall in Central Park, but there are little bursts of joy scattered among each corner of NYC. Check out this heat map and see just how much happiness is floating around at your intersection.
