The Happiest Place in New York City

image courtesy of the Central Park Conservancy

Doing research on a completely different topic, we stumbled upon the blog Computational Story Lab ++;, a collection of musings from a "group of applied mathematicians working on large-scale, system-level problems" at the University of Vermont.

The article we found posed the beguiling question, "What's the happiest place in New York City?" You can read the full post here, but the gist of their admittedly non-scientific inquiry was to use a list of words that had previously been ranked as indicators of happiness and connect them to geotagged Twitter posts throughout the city. (Note: from the blog, it appears that their research focused only on Manhattan, but it could be that the outer boroughs simply did not have as much data.)

So, what's the answer? Not surprisingly, the highest number of positive tweets come from within Central Park, and in the park the highest ranked place seems to be somewhere near the hypothetical intersection of Seventh Avenue and West 77th Street. This is on the Ramble side of the lake and is full of serene and picturesque spots. Nearby highlights include the Ramble Stone Arch (pictured above) and the recently rebuilt Oak Bridge.

What's your happiest place in the city? Let us know and maybe we can include it in a future post.

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Read more about the history of Central Park in New York in 

Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City.

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