Philly Venue Landscape
Mapping Philadelphia's event source registry — what free data sources exist for every venue, group, and location that could host events?
4,882 venues found via OSM Overpass (free, no auth). 3,400+ additional city facilities and markets via OpenDataPhilly.
Estimated 70-80% coverage of the durable venue landscape using only free sources. Music venues, private event spaces, and pop-up locations are the biggest gaps.
Part of the Reality project — building the intelligence infrastructure for social life.
Venue Counts by Type
OSM Overpass
City Open Data
Free Library
Gap
Data Sources Tested
OpenStreetMap Overpass API
Access Free, no auth
Format JSON / XML
Coverage 4,882 venues in Philly bbox
Quality 4/5
Freshness Continuous (community-updated)
NYC Transfer 5/5 — same API, different bbox
Best single source for venue discovery. Bars, restaurants, parks, churches, theatres, and community centres are well-covered. Music venues are severely undercounted (5 tagged vs ~50+ real).
Use first — build initial registry from OSM data
OpenDataPhilly — PPR Program Sites
Access Free, no auth
Format GeoJSON / CSV / ArcGIS REST
Coverage 171 recreation centers, pools, senior centers
Quality 5/5
Freshness October 2025
NYC Transfer 1/5 — city-specific
Official city data: 159 rec centers, 6 older adult centers, 3 pools, 3 environmental education centers. 165 have buildings, 56 have gyms.
Layer onto OSM for government/public venue coverage
OpenDataPhilly — City Facilities Master DB
Access Free via ArcGIS REST
Format JSON (paginated at 2,000)
Coverage 3,197 city-owned facilities
Quality 3/5
Freshness 2019 timestamps in samples
NYC Transfer 1/5 — city-specific
Comprehensive but categories are encoded (A11, A13, etc.) without a public lookup table. Hub download URLs are broken; must query FeatureServer directly.
Useful but needs category decoding work
OpenDataPhilly — Farmers Markets
Access Free, no auth
Format JSON via ArcGIS REST
Coverage 32 farmers markets
Quality 5/5
Freshness Active
NYC Transfer 1/5 — city-specific
Excellent structured data: hours per day, seasons, SNAP/FMNP/Philly Food Bucks payment, transit access, operator contact info. Model for what a source registry entry should look like.
Small dataset but perfect schema model
Free Library of Philadelphia — RSS Events
Access Free, no auth
Format RSS (XML)
Coverage Events across 54+ branches
Quality 5/5
Freshness Live (events happening today)
NYC Transfer 2/5 — NYPL has different format
Structured events with title, description, date, time, location, and images. Author events, storytimes, cooking classes, language groups, tech help. Feed capped at 10 items; calendar website behind Cloudflare.
High-value event source; needs scraping strategy for full coverage
Google Places API (New)
Access Free tier (per-SKU limits)
Format JSON
Coverage Not tested (no API key)
Quality Expected 5/5
Pricing Post-March 2025: 10K free/month per SKU
NYC Transfer 5/5 — same API worldwide
Most comprehensive commercial venue database. Would fill gaps in music venues, private event spaces, and coworking. Requires Google Cloud account with billing enabled.
Defer to Phase 2 — upgrade path for gap-filling
Yelp Fusion API
Access Paid only ($7.99/1K calls)
Format JSON
Pricing No free tier since 2019
NYC Transfer 5/5 — same API worldwide
Not cost-effective for venue discovery when OSM and Google Places cover the same types. Yelp's unique value (reviews/ratings) isn't needed for the source registry.
Skip — not worth the cost
Coverage Matrix
| Venue Type |
OSM |
PPR |
City Fac. |
Markets |
Library |
Google |
| Bars / Pubs / Nightclubs | 513 | — | — | — | — | High |
| Restaurants | 1,278 | — | — | — | — | High |
| Recreation Centers | ~79 | 159 | Inc. | — | — | Some |
| Libraries | ~118 | — | Inc. | — | Events | Some |
| Parks | 835 | — | Inc. | — | — | Some |
| Places of Worship | 1,552 | — | Some | — | — | High |
| Theatres / Cinemas | 99 | — | Some | — | — | High |
| Arts / Galleries / Museums | 149 | — | Some | — | — | High |
| Sports / Fitness | 254 | — | Some | — | — | High |
| Music Venues | 5 | — | — | — | — | High |
| Farmers Markets | ~3 | — | — | 32 | — | Some |
| Private Event Spaces | ~0 | — | — | — | — | Some |
Gap Analysis
What's invisible to automation:
- Music Venues Only 5 tagged in OSM (World Cafe Live, Fillmore, Brooklyn Bowl, Foundry, Union Transfer). Missing ~45+ real venues. Most are tagged as bars/nightclubs instead.
- Private Event Spaces Hotel ballrooms, rooftop venues, rental spaces. Nearly zero in any free source. Exist mainly on Peerspace/Splacer.
- Churches as Venues 1,552 places of worship in OSM but no signal for which ones host public events (concerts, dinners, AA meetings, community events).
- Pop-up Venues Warehouse parties, gallery pop-ups, outdoor festivals. Ephemeral by nature — no data source captures these.
- Coworking Spaces Host meetups, talks, and workshops. Poorly tagged in OSM.
- Schools as Community Spaces Evening/weekend community events in school buildings. Not in any venue database as event spaces.
- Neighborhood Coverage Bias Center City and University City are well-mapped. North Philly, Kensington, and Southwest likely have lower OSM density.
Technical Gotchas
OSM regex trap: Querying amenity~"bar|pub" also matches public_bookcase (Little Free Library street boxes). Use exact equality (amenity=bar OR amenity=pub) instead.
OSM area query broken: area["name"="Philadelphia"] returns zero results at all admin levels. Use bounding box (39.87,-75.28,40.14,-74.96) instead — but filter for NJ/suburb spillover in post-processing.
OpenDataPhilly Hub links broken: CSV/GeoJSON download URLs return 404. Must query the ArcGIS FeatureServer REST API directly. Results paginate at 2,000 records.
Overpass rate limiting: ~40% failure rate on parallel requests. Use sequential queries with 10-second delays between calls.
Free Library RSS capped at 10: Feed returns max 10 items regardless of parameters. Calendar website is behind Cloudflare challenge — needs browser-based scraping.
NYC Transferability
| Source | Score | Notes |
|---|
| OSM Overpass | 5/5 | Same API, different bbox. NYC is better-mapped. |
| Google Places | 5/5 | Same API worldwide |
| Free Library RSS | 2/5 | Pattern transfers; NYPL has different format |
| PPR Program Sites | 1/5 | City-specific. NYC Parks open data equivalent. |
| City Facilities | 1/5 | City-specific. NYC open data equivalent. |
| Farmers Markets | 1/5 | City-specific. GrowNYC equivalent. |
The methodology transfers perfectly. The specific city datasets need to be re-discovered per city. OSM and Google Places are the only truly city-agnostic sources.
Recommended Build Sequence
- OSM Overpass Free, no auth, 4,882 venues. Build the initial registry from bars, restaurants, parks, theatres, community centres, arts venues.
- OpenDataPhilly ArcGIS REST Layer on city-specific data: 171 rec centers, 32 farmers markets, 3,197 city facilities. Fills government/public-space gaps.
- Free Library Events RSS scraping for library events. High-quality structured data. Model for scraping other institutional calendars.
- Google Places Gap-filling pass for music venues, event spaces, coworking. Cross-reference with OSM to deduplicate.
- Physical Exploration Walk neighborhoods to find what no data source captures. Focus on areas with low OSM mapping density.
Research conducted 2026-02-09 as part of the Reality project.
Full findings: category-1-venues-locations.md
• All Reality research