I write a column for grouphug magazine, in which I visit a completely random block in NYC and write about it. I also include a puzzle related to the block! Here are expanded versions of my columns, reprinted here with the kind permission of the good people at grouphug.
How do I randomly generate a block? I have a database of the 37,984 census blocks in New York City, which I used for my senior thesis, and which you, too, can download from NYC Open Data. These are blocks
in the traditional sense — quadrilaterals (typically) bounded on four sides by streets. (Some blocks are a bit more peculiar — parks, airports, parcels of the East River — so when I randomly generate one of these I simply choose a new number between 0 and 37,983.) For this project, I wanted to use blocks
in the more colloquial sense, that of both sides of a street between two other streets, so upon generating a block I then randomly choose one of the four sides of that blocks
to use.
The puzzles are a bit of added fun. I make no promises that they're solvable; they capture the fleetingness of a moment in time. Sometimes, you just had to be there.