Got another note from Nathan Ward — which as an aside, reminds me that maybe when his new bio of Hammett hits the stands later this year, I could do another Biography Month celebration here on Up and Down These Mean Streets, like I did after reading the bio of Jim Tully back in 2012.
This time Nathan pops in a link to crime maps of San Francisco, which do “elevations” of parts of town where various crimes occur. Yeah, The Tenderloin is pretty flat in real life, but when it comes to crime, it is Everest compared to Nob or Russian Hills.
“These crime maps appeared in Fast Company in 2010,” Nathan writes, “but I did not see them then. It makes mountain ranges of areas where crimes occur in town, category by category.
“What’s funny is how The Tenderloin is its own mountain range throughout, which shows you didn’t need a 3-D map to tell you that.”
Yeah, the TL has its rep, and that rep isn’t just based on anecdotal word-of-mouth about muggings and drug sales, it has stats behind it, too. Check out the site for entirely different views of mountainous San Francisco.
Nathan adds, “It would be cool, however, to use this technology to map out the Op stories and their crime locales. Like the Mapbacks, but 3-D.”
I wonder how a “Hammett fiction elevation” would fit in over or next to the real life stats? I’m thinking it would match reality pretty well.
