Question: Where is the happiest place in New York City?

Possible answers:

1. Immediately adjacent to any hot dog stand.
2. Madison Square Garden during moments of Linsanity.
3. Tim Tebow’s new apartment building.

No really though, let’s measure some stuff.

Facts: (1) New York City is the most populous city in the US and (2) Manhattan streets are arranged on a rectangular grid. We have already seen how cities, airports, and even streets can be identified using geotagged tweets – here we use more than a half million messages from 2011 to investigate the happiness of NYC streets and avenues (clearly visible in the image below, as is Central Park).

Binning tweets by avenue and street, we use the labMT word list to measure happiness in tweets as a function of avenue and street number:

The results suggest that the west side is slightly happier than the east side, and that happiness actually declines as one moves further uptown. Next we bin by intersection and plot a heat map showing the distribution of happiness over all of the street corners in Manhattan:

The happiest “corner” is actually just inside the western edge of Central Park, where the intersection of 7th and 77th would be (this is just north of the lake and east of the Hayden Planetarium)*. This corner elicits tweets with a relatively high abundance of the positive words “loves” and “sky”, and proportionally less negative words like “not”, “fear” and “no”. Many of the happiest locations actually fall within Central Park!

* Please note that the results reported in this post have not been vetted through panels of experts, statistical tests of significance, or scientific peer review.  They are intended to be a fun and lighthearted exploration of our more formal research interests.