One of the best parts about growing up in New York is that you don’t have to be initiated to the fact that there will be times when you need to bawl in public. It is a dubious birthright, in a sense, this knowledge that crying beyond the privacy of your own home will, at times, be unavoidable. There are places and strategies which make the act easier – how to cover your face and hold your body so strangers know you don’t need medical attention, just space to sob, for example – and now, Brooklyn programmer Kate Ray has published an open source guide for New Yorkers to share their stories of crying in public called Crying in Public, Technical.ly Brooklyn first reported.
Ray has also created such internet tools as an iOS app for where the “Williamsburg” of other cities is, a website for book playlist creation, and has in the works Floodlight, an open-source sexual harassment report tool.
In a post about the map on Medium, Ray recalls a time she, “broke up with someone over nine stops of a packed Saturday night subway because it started in Manhattan but he wanted to finish it in Brooklyn.” Oof.
The map’s stories are demarcated by emoji – from peaches to cats to a hammer and sickle. Sobbing faces are visibly the most popular marking. So far, only a single human is reported to have cried in the Bronx (“graduated from NYU”) and no one has cried in Staten Island, ever. Not once.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering how many reasons there are to cry in New York, this is not the first guide to where to cry in the city. The Tumblr NYC Crying Guide hasn’t been updated since last year, but much of its wisdom holds true: the 7 train is still a quick and affordable sob spot.
[H/t: Technical.ly Brooklyn]