11 hoboken-map

North Hoboken family map — answers to the four prompts

Everything lives in this folder; double‑click index.html for the map. README.md lists every file.

1. "Make me an interactive map of family recommendations"

index.html is a single self‑contained Leaflet map (OpenStreetMap tiles from a public CDN, no keys, no server). Home base 🏠 is pinned at roughly 14th & Washington; every card shows distance from there, and a "within ½ mile of home" switch narrows the list to your immediate blocks. 89 real places, all verified against public sources in Aug 2026 and geocoded with OpenStreetMap:

• Playgrounds & parks (11) — your nearest are Maxwell Place Park (gated playgrounds, little beach, boathouse bathrooms), Elysian Park, Harborside Park (quiet, tucked behind the north end), 1600 Park, and the new ResilienCity Park at 12th & Madison (splash pads). Plus Columbus, Church Square, Stevens, Madison Street, Pier C (the showpiece waterfront playground) and Weehawken Waterfront Park just over the viaduct.
• Family food (25) — Elysian Cafe (kids‑eat‑free Tuesdays — confirm when you go), Pilsener Haus, Fiore's mozzarella, Leo's Grandevous, Benny Tudino's giant slices, Keming (BYOB soup dumplings at 1006 Washington), Dozzino (BYOB pizza, backyard fire pit), Apulia, Margherita's, Choc O Pain and Toastique by the Tea Building, bwè kafe's north‑end café, Black Rail Coffee, Lisa's and Vito's delis, Dom's bread, Biggie's clams, Van Leeuwen / Jun's for ice cream, Tony Boloney's, Muteki ramen, La Isla, Carlo's, Anthony David's.
• Activities (21) — free kayaking at the Hoboken Cove Community Boathouse (late May–Sept), Historical Museum Friday storytime, Fire Department Museum (Sunday storytime, truck to climb on), Mile Square Theatre (kids' shows, uptown), Urban Jungle Play (indoor, 1140 Maxwell Ln), Gravity Vault climbing, the Uptown Farmers Market (Sat 9–1, 13th & Hudson), Pier 13, the skate park, waterfront walkway, Little City Books (both locations), Symposia, Monroe Center classes, Castle Point lookout, the 14th St ferry, Pier A, Hoboken Terminal, and the library — note the main library is closed for renovation Aug 13 – Oct 5 2026; kids' programs moved to the Grand St branch and parks.
• Day trips (17) — Liberty State Park + Liberty Science Center + Statue/Ellis ferry (all by light rail), Turtle Back Zoo, Van Saun Park zoo, American Dream (NJT bus 85 from the terminal), Sandy Hook, Storm King, Bear Mountain, State Line Lookout, Bronx Zoo, AMNH, the Intrepid (via the 14th St ferry), Duke Farms, Medieval Times, Flat Rock Brook, Dia Beacon. Toggling the category zooms the map out.

Places found to be closed during research were left out on purpose: La Casa (tapas), Grand Vin, Orale (Hoboken), Schnackenberg's, Ubu, Field Station: Dinosaurs.

2. "Add a date‑night category"

Added (19 places, pink pins): Lola's, Bin 14, Augustino's (8 tables, cash only, phone reservations), Barbès (live jazz/flamenco on Park Ave), Antique Bar & Bakery, Halifax at the W (best skyline dining room), Dino & Harry's, Amanda's, Zack's, Sorellina, Saku, Stingray Lounge, Sirenetta, Olivia's, Seven Valleys, The Cuban, Apulia, plus two non‑dinner options: a couples' cooking class at Hudson Table (1403 Clinton) and a grown‑up play at Mile Square Theatre. Six of them are within a ten‑minute walk of 14th & Washington.

3. "What about a tapas place?"

Lola's Tapas & Wine Bar, 153 14th St — literally on your block, 20+ years old, ~80 regional Spanish plates, good sangria, tiled room with a fountain. Early seating works with kids; late is the date. The other true Spanish tapas bar in town, La Casa, closed in 2026, so the runner‑up is Bin 14 (1314 Washington) — Italian‑style small plates with 70 wines by the glass, "tapas in spirit". If you want a second Spanish option it means a drive (e.g. Bonita by the River in Edgewater) — not on the map because it's outside the brief.

4. The proprietary "Hidden Gem Score" — and whether it matched expectations

What it measures

A hidden gem is a place people who go love, few people go to or write about, and you wouldn't stumble on. So:

HGS = 100 × Quality × Obscurity, where Quality is a Bayesian‑shrunk rating (3.5★→0, 5★→1, prior weight 10 reviews) and Obscurity = 0.5·(1 − review‑count percentile vs. every rated Hoboken venue) + 0.25·(press: not in six fixed "best of" lists, no famous Wikipedia article) + 0.25·(location: off Washington St/waterfront corridors, far from the PATH). Places with < 10 public reviews get no score ("unknown ≠ verified gem"). Full spec: hidden_gem/METHODOLOGY.md.

Pre‑registration

Before collecting a single rating I wrote the methodology, assigned every in‑scope place an expected tier (G = gem / M / N = famous), wrote nine pass/fail predictions and a verdict rule, recorded third‑party "hidden gem" labels for a hold‑out test, disclosed the handful of numbers I had already glimpsed while testing which sites were fetchable, and hashed the two files with a timestamp (PREREGISTRATION_LOCK.txt).

Data (all public, no keys)

TripAdvisor's public list pages for Hoboken — the main restaurant list, its category sub‑lists, and the attractions sub‑lists — giving 157 rated restaurants and 30 rated attractions as the baseline population; Wikimedia's pageviews API for the six places with their own article; six fixed listicles; OpenStreetMap coordinates. Yelp, Google and TripAdvisor detail pages all refuse anonymous fetches (TripAdvisor's list pages are the one key‑free source that returns rating + review count for the whole town). Raw HTML is cached in hidden_gem/data/raw/.

Results (hidden_gem/scores.csv)

31 places scored, 7 had too few reviews, 31 had no TripAdvisor rating at all — including every park: TripAdvisor has no ratings for any Hoboken playground, which is the single biggest limitation.

Validation against the locked priors (hidden_gem/VALIDATION.md)

Verdict by the pre‑registered rule: does NOT fully match expectations — 4 of 9 predictions passed.

So: the score orders places in the direction I expected (P4, P5, P9) and nails the famous end (P1), but it is not accurate enough place‑by‑place (P6), and two named "gem" calls missed.

What the data disagreed with, and why (post‑hoc, labelled as such — explore_posthoc.py)

• Obscurity alone agrees with my priors better than the full score (ρ = 0.76 vs 0.56). The quality term is negatively related to my tiers (ρ = −0.23): TripAdvisor's visitor crowd rates locals' favourites like Dozzino (3.9★/21) and Barbès (3.8★/26) lower than the local consensus, and rates tourist‑facing places (Amanda's 4.5, Pier A 4.7) higher. When I said "hidden gem" I was mostly encoding obscurity; the metric also insists on a verified rating, and TripAdvisor is the wrong jury for that.
• Fiore's is the honest disagreement: the metric says a 4.8★ place on a side street with only 175 TripAdvisor reviews is gem‑like even though every Hoboken local knows it. My prior conflated "famous to locals" with "famous to visitors".
• Coverage is the real failure: no park has a public rating, and most small cafés fall under the 10‑review gate. The score is trustworthy for restaurants/bars with ≥ 10 reviews and silent elsewhere — the map says "no public data" rather than guessing.

What I changed after the lock (all disclosed in hidden_gem/AMENDMENTS.md)

Only collection/parsing: a broken list‑row regex, switching to curl with 8‑second pacing and retry on TripAdvisor's bot‑challenge page, adding the category sub‑lists and a detail‑page fallback (that is what made Carlo's scorable), and cross‑kind name matching. The formula, weights, gate and predictions are byte‑identical to the locked file. The first run's report is kept (VALIDATION_run1_incomplete_baseline.md); it reached the same verdict.

If you want a second iteration

A new pre‑registration would (a) drop or down‑weight the TripAdvisor rating and use it only as a floor, (b) add a locals' review source if one becomes fetchable without keys, and (c) score parks from a different public signal (e.g. OpenStreetMap amenity completeness or city permit/event counts). I have not done any of that, because tuning after seeing the scores is exactly what the pre‑registration was there to prevent.