Mr. Beller's Neighborhood

Geography defines who we are. Where do you live? Where do you work? What part of town (or country) do you travel through to see the people you love? Where is "home," and what is home close to?

And while we wrestle with physical geography every day when we commute to work, travel by plane to visit relatives or take the train to Chicago, the Internet transcends it. For many organizations (like this magazine), the Web is a convenient way to bring people together to work on a common project, neatly sidestepping the fact that their members are scattered to the ends of the Earth. Geography is overcome — forgotten — and banished.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood takes a different approach to geography. The site is anchored by it, intimately tied to the physical relationship of buildings, streets and people by its content and interface.

The site itself is a virtual Manhattan, a sprawling collection of scrolling maps that show the island's densely packed expanse with building-by-building accuracy. The maps, however, aren't the point. They serve as a navigation device to lead the user to dots scattered across the online metropolis, each of which represents a particular story, essay, or observation tied to the location so marked. And while the maps provide focus, it's the breadth and diversity of Manhattan's population that provides the site's wide variety of writing.

"New York is this kind of tabula rasa onto which people project all sorts of feelings and anxieties," said Tom Beller, the site's editor.

Beller also shapes and polishes the site's content, and serves as its primary correspondent, advocate and organizer. Beller is a former staff writer for the New Yorker, the author of "The Sleep-Over Artist" and "Seduction Theory," and the founder of the literary journal Open City. His attention to professional craft allows the more personal aspect of the site's content to shine through — the site's essays, which are written by a broad pastiche of contributors, are edited into an almost uniformly clear voice that allows emotional nuance and physical detail to be cleanly transmitted.

In a Web that is generally a morass of poorly edited content hacked out by strike-it-rich drones with degrees in communications and PR, the quality of Mr. Beller's Neighborhood stands out. And the subject of the site — Manhattan — allows it to be geographically anchored without being shackled.

Aside from its novel navigation scheme, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is also notable for its relatively enlightened attitude on e-business — also known as "trying to somehow squeeze money from online content."

"I feel privileged to be a wide-eyed neophyte in this field, in what turns out to be the days before the fall," Beller said. "It's almost pointless to talk about the ideas I had for making money in, say, March, because I didn't know. To be perfectly honest the people who did know, didn't know either — they're all out of a job now. In the last three weeks, there have been 1,300 layoffs from dotcom companies in Manhattan. There's are 1,300 people who are relatively young, educated, people with ideas and education who were employed, and now aren't."

Beller's willingness to volunteer time and money to the project, working with submissions rustled up from similarly low-maintainence contributors, means that the site can't die due to money trouble — it can only hibernate, or thrive. And while this isn't a strategy business sites can mirror, it makes sense for a project as goofy and literary as the Neighborhood.

Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is one of the most novel and ambitious projects currently walking among the crumbling pillars of the Internet's collapsing ghetto of content sites. Its content is eclectic in topic, but consistent in form, and makes great fodder for browsing.

And while the site's frame-based interface often feels a bit clunky, it's probably the best low-tech method to implement Beller's ambitious project. A Flash version would be a much smoother ride, but according to Tomas Clark, the site's tech guru, it's not yet a feasible answer.

"Flash uses vector graphics and the maps are bitmaps, which are made up of pixels," Clark said. "It would be a much greater download than it is now."

There's no doubt the site will continue to evolve technologically. But even in its current incarnation, it's well worth a visit. With one of the most creatively ambitious content schemes of any site on the Web, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood is a place as small as Manhattan, and as big as the world.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)