Josh Hadro
@hadro
Librarian and digital scholarship/data person working in cultural heritage. Also a former journalist and current local journalism booster in #Brooklyn / #NYC I work for the largest library in the world but all skeets and thoughts here are my own
You can see amidst the rubble the remains of the Statue of Liberty illustration that was painted over the old Sherita sign at Atlantic Av and Classon Av in Brooklyn
I don't generally trust automated historical geocoding because streets change often, but for a work-in-progress the NYC addresses are basically stable and useful as a broad indicator of where listings clustered.
The first picture I took of my kid outside the NICU had the Sherita sign in the background
Fare thee well, Sherita sign and the building upon which you stood Your history was sketchier than almost anyone knew (www.thecityreporter.nyc/2025/05/19/s...), but you were a Brooklyn landmark nevertheless
And a companion view that collapses all those individual listings into a listing of "establishments" -- or at least does the best that can possibly be done programmatically for ~100,000 individual listings written by humans and typeset into travel guides in the middle of the 20th century.
Getting pretty close to finishing a first pass on a fun personal project that brings together travel listing across a bunch of different publications from ~1930-1966
I cannot urge you strongly enough to spend a random evening every now and then hand-transcribing 150 year old city directories from where you live, because you will find out that an inventor from 1876 lived around the corner from you!
Maybe if we went back to the era where license plates were printed in annual indexes along with your name and home address, there’d be more accountability for drivers running over pedestrians E.g., digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/0b4ed4...
21 entries in the explorer … you may be able to guess what source material I’m working with
I’m working on a data explorer for some mid-19th century travel guides, based on the output of my Directory Pipeline tool, and I’m really jazzed about how it’s coming along!
Everyone wants to live in Roku City, but I woke up last night and couldn't get "Roku Suburb" out of my brain so now you have to witness an approximation of it
Ha, it is there, but it was called Lytle-Stoppenbach Company at the time! Most volumes have an entry for it, e.g. hadro.github.io/brewery-guid... and hadro.github.io/brewery-guid... What a fun connection!
I'm fascinated by digitized historical directories, and I'm a big #IIIF booster, so naturally I spent some recent evenings building the tool I wanted to see in the world: a "Data Explorer" view of 12 brewery directory guides from 1896 to 1918: hadro.github.io/brewery-guid...
If nothing else, it makes it possible to explore the dozens of breweries that a century ago were all within a few miles of where I live!
Calling all technologists, artists and other creative visionaries: The Library of Congress has opened the call for the next Innovator in Residence! Apply by 2pm ET April 10 newsroom.loc.gov/news/library...
post a perfect album from the 90s that isn't nirvana, pearl jam, soundgarden, or alice in chains
On one hand: furloughed 👎 On the other hand: afternoon pinball with a 4 year old, hell yeah (2-player cooperative grand champion to boot 💪)
On one hand: furloughed On the other hand: weekday visit to NY Transit Museum with a 4 year old, hell yeah
Tired: getting into 3D printing and generating cheapo schlock Wired: Marrying a sculptor/ceramicist and asking for ridiculous custom hand-crafted artisanal kitchen gadgets based on hare-brained ideas
This is the hat I wear every day. RIP to an all-time great who led the ensemble cast of one of the greatest caper films of all time.
Crystal Hudson just sent out an email blast telling ebike riders to "SLOW DOWN!" Where's the email blast to car drivers responsible for 99% of the injuries & deaths? Where's the outrage about ghost plates? Or how about the single 2024 Kia Forte terrorizing her district and racking up speeding tix?
Is yours very vocal and particularly bonded to one person? Because this guy sure is, more than any other cat I’ve met.
This dataviz is like those maps of how wolves delineate their territory, except instead of wolves it's a map of antisocial car-brained sociopaths. (Via this excellent data-driven local journalism from Streesblog: nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/04/16/m...)
Any Brooklynite will tell you: this is the only cybertruck deserving of the title