Is Dimes Square Cooked?

Insecurity & Subway data

Dimes Square is a few blocks in lower manhattan that were designed to make me feel old and clueless. Naturally, I’ve developed a morbid fascination with it.

Unknown Cool Guys in Dimes Square, June ‘24

I play soccer nearby each Monday night¹. And so with an unhealthy frequency I forgo the psychological safety of Park Slope, where I can smirk at the athleisure dads and feel secure in my relative youth, and venture to this “microneighborhood” where people wearing giant pants smoke cigarettes and drink Georgian wine and discuss Hegel.

But recently, I was walking down Canal Street into the belly of the beast with my friend Ali, who is something of an ambassador between me and the Cool Guys. Just as I was frantically struggling with the belt on my jeans to make them appear baggier, he uttered a phrase that broke the spell: “Yo, is Dimes Square cooked?”

A revelation.

Come to think of it, my friends and I have been able to get a table to watch the premier league at forgtmenot² on saturday mornings, sometimes even in the main room where other customers can see us. And I had been noticing empty tables during my monday night strolls past the bars and small-plates restaurants; below is from last night, with beautiful early fall weather at 8pm.

Something is amiss at the corner of Canal and Division.

New York has great open data which you can access easily and for free.³ So, I looked at subway traffic through the East Broadway stop, which is right on the edge of the neighborhood, and seemed like a good proxy for the its popularity:

Subway traffic tends to be quite seasonal, with people traveling less around holidays. So I plotted the traffic monthly, with separate lines for each year. The bold line below is 2024.

What do you know! It seems like after a big 2023 (where traffic was much higher than 2022), traffic from the East Broadway station was down pretty significantly this summer, perhaps 10% between July and September. I can’t help but notice that the decline is pretty well-correlated to when I started going there regularly.

Comparing East Broadway to a few other subway stops in lower manhattan, it does seem like it had a relatively slow summer, with most of the other stops hovering at or above their 2023 traffic levels:

Late Night Subway Rides

Of course, a widely known thing about cool people is that they tend to go out late at night, far past Park Slope bedtimes. So, we can filter the data to departures between 12am and 3am⁴, and see how traffic in Dimes Square has changed:

Here, the data is a little less clear. Dimes Square clearly had a big New Years Eve at the end of 2023, with more than 2,000 departures from East Broadway in the wee hours during the first week of 2024.

And it looks like late night departures were roughly on par through most of 2024, with a bit of softness in the summer but a strong late August / early September. I have a sneaking suspicion that this was because of Fashion Week, which is obviously terrifying to think about.

In conclusion, my verdict on Dimes Square

Based on what I’ve seen, I’m comfortable saying it: Dimes Square is cooked. Of course, I expect that if that’s the case, many people have probably known about it for years now. But I’ll take comfort in the fact that I can walk to forgtmenot with my still-too-narrow pants, and maybe even my work backpack, and hold my head high, while I wait to stumble upon the next neighborhood to be intimidated by.

If people are interested in this I’ll make a little map so you can play with subway data, it’s really fun. If you liked this post, you may enjoy this one I wrote about neighborhoods being mentioned in the NYT food section.

1. At the Ground, which is amazing if you want to rent a place to play or have a party or watch a game

2. You should go to forgtmenot too, it’s a fun bar and the people are really nice

3. I was actually just working on something with a Google Maps API, which I had to pay for, and the New York Open Data API was better maintained. Point for the public sector!

4. Is 3am too early? Should I have done 4? 5!?? I think I was inspired to do this by this article, which analyzes uber and taxi trips and is very good.