Yelp's Wordmap Confirms Every Chicago Cliche

By Anthony Todd in Food on Jul 3, 2013 4:40PM

We've become kind of obsessed with the Yelp "Wordmap" feature since we discovered it yesterday afternoon. Yelp has aggregated all the reviews that mention certain words and mapped them out visually, and the Chicago results are... exactly what you'd expect.

The words they've chosen to pull out include things like bacon, hipster, view, tourist, cheap, BYOB, frat, PBR, pricey and more. Clicking on each one creates a red stain on the map, like what we hope CDC headquarters looks like. "The frat plague has moved past Lincoln Park, Director," we imagine their team of crack epidemiologists saying. "The hipsters have taken Logan Square and are moving into Boystown!"

Seriously, it's just what you'd expect. Tourist and view are downtown, hipster is west side, BYOB focuses on the north, pricey is downtown. The more fun thing is trying to figure out the strange little blips outside of the main zones. For instance, what "pricey" place is heating up Broadway and Devon? Uncommon Ground? Apparently, a single "tourist" is going to Halsted and Wrightwood. And why is Lakeview the bacon capital of the north side?

Oh, and unsurprisingly, there isn't much on the south side, at least as far as Yelp is concerned.

Anyway, play with it while you're avoiding work today. We guarantee it'll provide a fun diversion.