2026 · Experiments
City games are usually a fictional grid. I wanted a browser experiment where the streets are the actual map — something you can walk and drive, not a diagram of Manhattan.
I directed a bounded slice, Battery Park to 50th Street, from OpenStreetMap streets and building footprints, then shipped it as a site you can enter.
A playable slice of Manhattan, Battery Park to 50th Street, built from real OpenStreetMap streets and building footprints.
Manhattan Streets is a small city experiment: take a real piece of the island and make it playable in the browser. Every street and building footprint comes from OpenStreetMap. The playable area runs from Battery Park to 50th Street.
The constraint was the browser. A full borough will not finish loading. The cut had to stay recognizable — avenues, neighborhoods, a minimap with real street names — and still be a place you walk or drive rather than a map you only look at.
The map is the content. If the streets are invented, the experiment is just another block. If they are real, getting lost is the point.
OpenStreetMap is the set: streets and building footprints come from the map, not from a modeled city kit.
Bound the island: Battery Park to 50th Street is enough geography to feel like Manhattan and small enough to download.
Two speeds: walking and driving are two ways to read the same streets. The city should work at both.
A static map answers “where is this.” A playable one answers “what does this block feel like from the sidewalk, and from a car.” Street names, a minimap, weather, and time of day are what make that difference legible once the geometry is real.
Every street and building footprint comes from OpenStreetMap. Walk it, drive it, or cause trouble.
The first useful decision was the crop. South of 50th Street still includes the grid people recognize — numbered avenues, a minimap that can say Koreatown or 6th Avenue — without asking the browser to hold the whole island. Weather and a clock then give the same geometry more than one mood.
01
OpenStreetMap streets and building outlines are the level. A handmade grid would have been faster to art-direct and would have missed the only interesting part: that the corner you are standing on exists.
02
The experiment names its edges — Battery Park to 50th Street — so the download has an end. A bigger map would have looked more ambitious and arrived later, or not at all.
03
A minimap, street names, weather, and time of day stay in the world. You should be able to tell where you are without leaving the block to open a menu.
The live experiment loads a Manhattan street map and drops you in it. Walk with the keyboard, look with the mouse, get in a car, and move through the same OpenStreetMap streets and building footprints. A minimap names the avenue. Weather and the clock can change without reloading the city.
I directed it in Cursor with Fable 5.2 and published it as a demo you can open — a playable map, not a flythrough.
Battery Park to 50th Street
Map
OpenStreetMap streets and buildings
Source
Live on Vercel
Status
The download should introduce a landmark before the control list. People need to see a street they recognize while the map is still arriving.
I’d tune walking speed against a known avenue length next. If a crosstown block feels wrong, the real geometry stops mattering.
Stop waiting on developers. Start shipping complete websites — and keep all the revenue that comes with it.
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