Mapping NYC's Restaurants Closed Due to COVID

New York City has lost nearly 650,000 jobs since the coronavirus pandemic came to the city roughly a year ago. Many, if not the majority, of those lost jobs were from the services and hospitality sectors: hotel workers, office cleaners, and — perhaps most notably — restaurant workers, among numerous others.

I’ve often said that New York is a city of neighborhoods and local bars and restaurants are often focal points of their communities (back when it was New Amsterdam, the city’s governing building was also a pub). So when a restaurant closes, the impact isn’t just felt by its workers and owners, but also its regular patrons and the neighborhood as a whole. What we’ve also seen over the course of this pandemic so far, though, is that not every neighborhood has had the same experiences — loss is not evenly distributed across space and time.

Last week, the news publication Patch NYC linked to this article giving a neighborhood-by-neighborhood breakdown of the restaurants that have closed across the five boroughs. What it didn’t include, though, was a map aggregating this information in a way that might be more digestible for a neighborhood-level (or event sub-neighborhood-level) analysis. As such, I took it upon myself to build that very map, giving a block-by-block breakdown of the restaurants the city has lost so far over the course of the pandemic. That map is just below, and interactive — so you can zoom, pan, and hover over the dots to see which restaurants they represent.

If you’re curious how I actually made the map, a quick breakdown of my methods can be found just past the map itself.