What would happen if you could search for characters found all over New York City?



There are a lot of different characters in the city, such as signs, billboards, and graffiti, but

Matt Daniels, a journalist and engineer at the visual essay site The Pudding , is experimenting with what would become clear if these were searchable.

NYC's Urban Textscape
https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/

For his experiment, Daniels used 'all text in nyc,' a search engine that can search for 'text' such as shop signs, graffiti, and advertisements throughout New York City. 'all text in nyc' is a work by media artist Yufeng Zhao , who collected millions of panoramic images of New York City from Google Street View over 18 years, from 2007 to 2024, and converted them into text using optical character recognition (OCR). More than 8 million Google Street View images were used to build 'all text in nyc,' identifying 138 million snippets of text. However, 'all text in nyc' only searches for 'text that exists within the range of a Google Street View vehicle's camera.' This does not include text found in back alleys or parks that cannot be photographed by Google Street View vehicles, or text too small to read in images captured by Google Street View vehicles.

'all text in nyc' is publicly available and available below.

all text in nyc
https://www.alltext.nyc/



Daniels used data from All Text in NYC to investigate how many different characters exist in New York City.

Below is a search result for the word 'pizza' ( 111,290 results ) found in New York City, shown as orange dots on the map. It is clear that New York City is full of pizza.



Below is an image showing the word 'Broadway' (

62,424 entries ) on a map in New York City. Most of them are road signs, and you can see that they are concentrated around multiple Broadways in New York.



Below is an image showing the word 'luxury' (

16,731 results ) on a map. All newly built residential buildings claim to be 'luxury.' It seems that Hudson Yards is the only building in the city that claims to be 'luxury.'



Below is an image showing the word 'beware' ( 10,419 occurrences ) on a map. Regarding why there are so many 'beware' words in New York City and why there are almost no 'beware' words in Manhattan, Daniels writes, 'Because the word 'beware' is concentrated in residential areas with lawns and fences.'



Below is an image showing the word 'gold' (

51,353 results ) on a map. Manhattan's diamond district and the streets lined with jewelry stores and pawn shops that buy gold glow orange.



Below is an image showing the Spanish word 'church (iglesia)' (

16,967 entries ) on a map. It is easy to see where Spanish-speaking communities exist.



Below is an image showing the word 'jerk' (

4,900 results ), a cooking method originating in Jamaica, on a map. It can be seen that it is concentrated in Jamaican neighborhoods in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and the Jamaica District, Queens.



One of the most common phrases you'll hear on the streets of New York is 'fuhgeddaboudit' (forget about it).



You can also find many 'No Ball Playing' signs in New York.



A common type of graffiti on the roads is ' ACAB .'



According to All Text in NYC, the most common word in New York City was 'stop' ( 1,136,962 occurrences ), followed by 'one way' ( 828,362 occurrences ), both of which are transportation-related words. 21 of the top 30 most frequently occurring words were transportation-related.

The 492nd most frequently occurring word in all text in NYC is 'surveillance.' Daniels points out that because the New York City Police Department, businesses, and even parks departments explicitly state they are recording with surveillance cameras, 'surveillance warnings are part of the visual noise New Yorkers are bombarded with every day, and they feel almost normal.'



in Note, Posted by logu_ii