Although I’ve been familiar with New York City and its cultural sights and offerings for roughly 20 years, I’ve only been a resident for the past three. Having moved four times and lived in a couple of different neighborhoods, I’ve developed a more intimate relationship with the city. There are certain familiar sights and fixtures that are particular to this urban landscape, like pharmacies, bodegas, hot dog stands – things commonly seen in the city and also expected to be nearby when you need one.  These reliable things that add to the ‘personality’ of New York City are the things I am interested in, so for this project I decided to focus on another seemingly ubiquitous yet invisible business: Psychics. Are they evenly spread across the city or is there a particular concentration? What patterns are to be seen and where, and why?

To start, I needed raw data of addresses I could use to plot points on a map. NYC Open Data did not have any information on this type of business, which at first I thought was just because the source is relatively unhip but was actually because there is a particular law that makes practice for psychics difficult. Section 165.35 of New York State Law prevents anyone from making money off of claiming to tell the future, which means mediums in the city walk a fine line with their businesses.

A Vice article from 2015 explored how psychics in the city stay afloat and noted, “psychics must (legally) present themselves as entertainers, with a disclaimer that clarifies the readings shouldn’t be taken too seriously.” Since there was no hope of finding psychics in a sea of entertainment businesses on Open Data, I decided to get my information a more old fashioned way: The Yellow Pages.

Searching the directory under both New York City and Brooklyn, I was able to get addresses for over 300 psychics and mediums. After calculating latitude and longitude for each address, I plotted the point data on a map using CartoDB, a geospatial graphing software. The simple point view of the map revealed locations in not only the NYC metro area, but also some in New Jersey and Staten Island. The Yellow Pages seemed to have netted all psychics within a particular radius of the center of the city, so I eliminated most of the New Jersey addresses in order to focus on the core 5 boroughs of the city.

Predictably, Manhattan showed the most amount of psychics, but Brooklyn had a fair amount as well. To better see which areas had the most (or least) amount of businesses, I merged the dataset of addresses with some shapefiles of NYC zip codes. I created a chloropleth map to roughly visualize the data by neighborhood, coloring the densely concentrated areas the darkest.

The chloropleth clearly showed three dense areas: Midtown West, between Central Park South and W49th Street; Murray Hill, between E40th and E26th Street; and the Flatbush/Ditmas Park area of Brooklyn, below Prospect Park. Other notably dense outliers are the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan on the Upper East Side, the Sheepshead Bay/Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, and the Jackson Heights neighborhood of Queens.

Again, Midtown Manhattan is predictably the most densely populated area, but I found the specific figure of 13 psychics (the most in any neighborhood shown) in Murray Hill intriguing. Why so dense there, instead of a more obviously touristy area like Times Square? Also, what makes Yorkville so special with 5 psychics, and how come the neighborhoods on either side don’t have any? I don’t know much about the neighborhoods of Ditmas Park and Jackson Heights, but I can recognize Brighton Beach as a potentially tourist heavy area, so the density there makes sense to me. To glean more clues about the data and also to see if my visualizations were even useful or successful, I spoke to four people about the data shown.

Since I have been familiar with New York City for a while, I wanted to get perspectives from different people and see if they interpreted the data differently. My first subject was a person brand new to the city, having moved to here this very month. Hailing from California, “Subject A” had been reading up on NYC neighborhoods after getting a job in Brooklyn and trying to find a place to live. Subject B was a lifelong resident of suburban Indiana, only having visited NYC twice on business trips, and Subject C a person who has lived in a variety of cities like Memphis, Chicago, and San Antonio. Lastly, Subject D has been a resident of NYC for 6 years, previously having lived in Baltimore and Washington, DC.  I surmised that the people from more urban areas would pick up on the touristy clues in the data, and the city newcomer might have sharper insights on neighborhoods I have not been to, since they have been in a critically surveying mindset. I included the suburban subject because I wanted to see if the assumptions about urban tourism and population would be obvious to all.

https://bhezekiah.cartodb.com/viz/8a5fd4a4-4303-11e6-a13f-0e787de82d45/public_map

I asked each subject about ease of map readability, what their initial assumptions about the data were, and whether or not they would like to live or visit certain areas based on their assumptions. I figured if the densely populated psychic areas were associated with tourism, the “city” people would not want to live there, but the “suburban” people might be more inclined to visit those areas of the city because they catered more to entertainment. Subject A picked up on the tourism aspect right away, but said it wouldn’t influence whether or not they visited or lived in those areas.  Conversely, Subject B noted, “it appears the wealthier the location, the more psychics, I guess because people in those areas have more disposable income for such things.” This touches not so much on traditional tourism, but certainly the aspect of entertainment. They also noted their opinion about visiting any of the given areas would only change if they were actually looking to visit a psychic.

Subject C said they’d visit Murray Hill for “more psychic variety,” specifying “I heard it’s a huge yawn so maybe I’d reconsider it if it means I can get my palm read.” They also said it was surprising that there weren’t more psychics in Hell’s Kitchen. I was initially confused since I know Hell’s Kitchen is a big restaurant neighborhood,  so I asked why they were surprised. “If I were a psychic I’d be there. I’ve never been, but based on the name it seems like a great place for a psychic to hang out.” Subject D also picked up on income, noting that “they seem to be concentrated in more affluent parts of town or more touristy parts,” but again said it would not influence whether or not they would live or visit those neighborhoods.

In terms of readability, Subject A first thought the map was about general demographics in Manhattan, but then zoomed out and realized it included more parts of the NYC area. They did not know it was specifically about amounts of psychics until I told them. Subject B was surprised at the map’s contents; “Seriously psychics? Like people who read fortunes? Wow.” In hindsight, I think I would have presented the maps in a different format to make the info easier to see and understand. All four subjects were linked to the map via mobile, which I thought would be easier so it could facilitate quicker conversation. I was concerned that if I just emailed the map, it would be too static an experience and I would not be able to answer any additional questions. I also did not want to ask too many leading questions that would sway any opinions, but I think the limited viewing experience of mobile “cropped” the data for each user so it was harder to know how to explore the map and see patterns for themselves.

In terms of knowledge about particular neighborhoods, I wonder if in the future it would be useful for users to read a small bit of information about each area. This could also be unintentionally leading information, but it would also put each user on the same playing field since they would all be fed the same amount of facts on each neighborhood, instead of having to contextualize things themselves. The comment about Hell’s Kitchen was an interesting one, but what would that user have to say if they knew more about the Upper East Side, or if they knew to scroll further down to see the area of Brighton Beach? A list of neighborhoods could expand this universe more for each person before they made their observations.

Finally, I think a wider range of subjects might have given me the data I expected to see. All four people were not really bothered by the notion of living near psychics, whether there were tourists around or not. I thought the city dwellers would have had more to say about living in highly touristy areas, or even more to say about the types of people that visited psychics. The only correlation anyone made between demographics and psychic density was that rich people can afford to visit them more. Of course, wealthy people can afford to do lots and lots of things others can’t because of money, but I am more interested in why they would do one thing more than another. These findings are almost the same as if I had shown everyone a map of designer boutiques and asked them to talk about those instead. If this information was juxtaposed with another demographic type like culture or religion, then the findings would become more interesting, albeit perhaps precarious. If I intentionally chose usability subjects from different ages, cultures, and religions, would the onus be on me to summarize their feelings and beliefs based on what they saw? Or would I just be presenting facts? There were many things I shied away from because I thought they might get too judgy or controversial, but now I feel like that edge is missing from this project.  After all, no one who reads about psychics is preoccupied in being safe from controversy.