Looks like Google Maps just did a refresh of Street View. Chicago proper has been available for a while, but they’ve just added most of my neighborhood, Roscoe Village. The shots were clearly taken on a beautiful day this summer. A little gift as we hunker down for even more winter weather. I haven’t seen the sidewalk through the snow in weeks.

Let’s start at the west end of my street where the Four Treys Tavern announces “Hey This Is a Party Block” to entrants (also the scene of the flaming garbage truck). Apparently the Four Treys has been on this spot since 1887. It’s a bit out of whack with the style of other bars in the area, a throw-back to earlier incarnations of the neighborhood. Part biker bar, part karaoke bar, part never-really-left-the-1970’s bar. Why the “Four Treys”, you ask? Location: 3333 N. Damen. (Took me, oh, two years to figure that out.)

Proceeding eastward down Henderson you encounter a typical streetscape of mostly single-family homes, part of the urban grid of 25′ x 125′ lots. My neighborhood restricts height to three stories except in a very few special cases. Basically no one towers over anyone else, sunlight is equitably distributed (or, more accurately, equitably not distributed) and the scale of the street stays mostly in line with the tops of the trees. It’s a charming block, a mixture of homes, a condo building or two, and renters. Jane Jacobs would be proud.

Interestingly, it is possible to date this panorama almost exactly without leaving the block. This is first because of the presence of MySweetRide on the south side of Henderson. (A dark blue/gray Honda Accord. Who can spot her?) Using my car’s Twitter archive I see that she was parked in this exact spot on Sunday, July 1 and then again on Monday, August 27. My first thought was that it had to be July 1 because of the number of American flags hung out in from of houses and the fact there are so many cars on the street (i.e., not a work day).

But the proof is at the other end of the block. Two flimsy roadblocks lean against the last house on the north side of the street. These barricades were loaned from the alderman for our annual block party, held on Sunday, August 26. (Other evidence confirms that the GoogleMobile was in town in late August.)

It’s kinda fun sleuthing about various lifestream data points on the web like this. In all I consulted Street View, Twitter, Weather Underground, Google Calendar, and my own blog and del.icio.us archives to figure out merely when a photo was taken. (I could have told you what music I was listening to when this shot was taken, but it was not, in itself, relevant to the problem at hand.) It’d be great to have some kind of meta-aggregator for the data-wake one leaves moving through time.

But mostly the new view is just a comforting reminder of a lazy summer afternoon. I suspect I will be returning to it for the smile it brings a few more times this winter.

——–

A couple of notes on Street View itself:

Never noticed this before, but there isn’t a single readable license plate I can find. I think Google has deliberately blurred every one of them. Amazing.

Would be great if you could link to specific orientation of the panorama like you can to a specific address.

How soon until you can annotate Street View like you can the maps themselves?

I notice that almost exactly one year ago I had a similar urge to post about how miserable winter had become. Well, it just got miserabler.

It started OK. We’ve had a snowier January than I can remember in many years. Which makes the several days of bitter cold at least aesthetically pleasing.

“Daddy, my eyelids are frozen shut.”

“I know, son, but if you could open them you’d find the streetscape very beautiful.”

The other upside of this dose of winter is learning the seemingly endless forms that water can take. Snow, ice, liquid, of course. Add to that list the intermediate states of sleet, slush, sneet, and snush. (Can’t forget thundersnow either.)

Photo by santheo

This morning as I went for a run I witnessed — indeed experienced — the most diabolical form yet. It only occurs when the thermometer is all over the place, warm enough for liquid water to stick around close to the ground yet cold enough for the water to freeze when exposed to the air.

What happens on the sidewalks is that certain squares of concrete that are askew and lower than grade fill with near-freezing water. A very thin layer of ice non-uniformly covers this water and looks distressingly like the textured surface of the sidewalk itself. So you never quite know if what you are about to step in is solid or liquid and (here’s the kicker) how deep it all is. To make it a real gauntlet-run the edges of the sidewalk are piled high with snow. So you get shoes soaken with water that is trying desperately to become ice. And a bonus: windblown ice pellets that impact the face like a fragmenting comet hitting the moon.

The ultimate indignity comes only on the coldest runs though. I wear a little hat with ear flaps that fasten under my chin. Even on subzero days one sweats when running and the sweat from my head channels down the flap-straps ending at the fastener. Slowly this saline sweat freezes and, as more and more pours off my head, a little icicle comes to form. By the end of, say, a six mile run I have an icicle several inches long swinging from side to side from my chin. Quite comical, a cross between Frosty the Snowman and Fu Manchu.

Did I mention we’re expecting the heaviest snowfall today in nine years?