A couple months ago, Nicole and I were chatting about the lack of an online resource for our neighborhood, East Harlem. Everything we could find on the neighborhood was either extremely outdated or hard to use. So we decided to build our own little platform to host small community sites to refer people to when they were looking for restaurants, apartments or even the history of a certain neighborhood.
One of the main reasons we decided to start working on Sovisit, was the fact that I was reading a handful of books learning basic front-end development, and instead of using the boring homework assignment example pages, I could apply them to a more realistic product.
We also realized that this wasn’t an entirely novel idea, and that someone could probably get a lot more info out of Craigslist or Foursquare, but the one advantage we have is that anyone crazy enough to build a site for their own neighborhood is probably pretty passionate about it and would have some good hints for someone new to the neighborhood. We think it’s better advice than a a one-off post on craigslist or review on yelp. I could bring all the loose reviews, apartment listings, and wikipedia posts to one place.
That’s it! See the site here: Sovisit.us As I still consider myself a beginner to this code nonsense, feel free to let me know if anything isn’t working or if you have some advice!
I have been doing some research for the past couple weeks for a personal project Nicole and I are working on, and we have found a handful of really cool photos of East Harlem in the 1930s. Today I got the urge to run around with about 15 of these old photos and try and track down where they were located (The older photos are courtesy of nycgov.com).
I got a little overzelous and was showing them to a few employees of these businesses, and needless to say, the people working at these stores weren’t nearly as excited as I was. The owner at the Euromex Soccer store was the most interested but when I told him his store used to be a funeral/embalming business, he didn’t seem all that excited anymore.
Snowy morning in East Harlem.
Nicole taking photos of me at the MET.
Tracking down more photos of my Grandpa and his mechanic shop.
George W. up to his tricks.
A day at the MET.
117th Street.
The view from East Harlem looking down the river gets me every-time.
Scanned a handful of photos in from the past few weeks
Love this old photo of my Grandpa.
After Christmas hikin’
Ice & Snow covered lake on the Appalachian Trail.
A whole week of this comin’ up.
