When we heard about New York Craft Beer Week and their nine craft beer crawls around the city we knew that we had to post the crawls and feature them. So what exactly is New York Craft Beer Week?

Neighborhood Bar Crawls ... NY State Brewery Beer Dinner Pairings ...
Beer Education ... 3rd Annual NY Brewfest ... 2nd Manhattan Cask Ale Festival
 
September 12-21 is your chance to experience a wide range of breweries, beers and activities during NY Craft Beer Week! Opening and closing Craft Beer Week are the 3rd Annual NY Brewfest and the 2nd Annual Manhattan Cask Ale Festival featuring a selection of beers that is rarely equaled in a similar context anywhere else in the country.

You can check out any of the bars on any of the crawls, but for the full experience (plus free beer and a glass!) buy some tickets (they're less than twenty bucks).
 
Explore all of the crawls @ Mapfaced, or head directly to any one of them below:

• NY Craft Beer Week - Downtown Brooklyn
• NY Craft Beer Week - East Village
• NY Craft Beer Week - Greenpoint
• NY Craft Beer Week - Lower East Side
• NY Craft Beer Week - Midtown
• NY Craft Beer Week - Park Slope
• NY Craft Beer Week - Upper West Side
• NY Craft Beer Week - West Village
• NY Craft Beer Week - Williamsburg

Recession Got You Down? How about some free food with your drinks? This isn't a crawl...it's a collection of some our favorite bars that serve up free eats when you order drinks. Spots Where The Food Is Free With Your Drinks, built by JoshMapfaced.

Free drinks? We can't help you there, but there are a number of bars in our fair city that offer free food when you come to drink.

We're launching a new feature, Crawl of The Week. Every seven days or so we'll post a crawl we love - sometimes user built, sometimes editorial. For our first crawl of the week we're highlighting 'East Village to Grand Central,' built by goldzepp

An epic march up north from Burp Castle & McSorley's to Grand Central. If you miss the last train out, it's not my fault. Course you could just take a little more time on the way and just get the first train out!

Ride the City is another great local Google Maps mashup to report on:

Welcome to Ride the City, a website that helps you find the safest bike route between any two points in New York City. The concept is pretty simple. Just like MapQuest, Google, Microsoft, and other mapping programs, Ride the City finds the shortest distance between two points. But there are two major differences. First, RTC excludes roads that aren't meant for biking, like the BQE and the Queens Midtown tunnel. Second, RTC tries to locate routes that maximize the use of bike lanes and greenways.

Mapfaced doesn't have a monopoly on great maps for eating and drinking in NYC, and we're always happy to share our favorite sites with you. Beer Menus, a herculean effort to map out the ever changing beer menus of New York City's hundreds and hundreds of bars is one of those sites. As of early June they are listing over 1500 beers at 264 different joints. Very impressive. While you're there, check out Josh's favorite beer as of late, and David's.
 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 4, 2008

Editor of Good Night Mr. Lewis launches
Mapfaced: an online community that creates
bar & restaurant crawls on a printable map

Press Contact:
media@mapfaced.com

 

New York, NY – Joshua Malin, the Editor of Good Night Mr. Lewis has launched Mapfaced.com with his brother and partner David Malin. From his experience in the nightlife industry, behind the bar and behind the blog, Joshua saw the need for an online community that allows users to create maps detailing their favorite nights out in New York City, from point a to point b to point c.

Understanding that New Yorkers never see eye to eye, and aware of the millions of possibilities New York offers for an incredible evening out, the Malin brothers have built a community that allows users to create, rate, and comment on each others crawls, suggesting deviations, or giving feedback once a user has experienced the crawl for themselves.

What sets Mapfaced apart from any other nightlife website is the way the crawls pull together entire evenings. Further, Mapfaced offers up a mix of editorial and user-created crawls. Drawing on his resources in the nightlife and dining arenas, Joshua has assembled an editorial team who create weekly crawls based on their vast knowledge of the City.

According to nightlife godfather Steve Lewis, “As both my editor, and the one who introduced me to a part of the web I didn’t even know existed – the blogosphere – Joshua has the voice and the vision to make Mapfaced truly great.”

Mapfaced has been in private beta since April and during that time thousands of friends, family, and strangers have put the site through its paces. Crawls have been built, comments have been left, bugs have been squashed, and now Mapfaced has opened their doors to the public. Enjoy.

Mapfaced Drink is now available. Mapfaced Eat will follow this summer.

 

About Joshua Malin
Long before Napster, a dedicated group of music lovers built websites and ran FTP servers to trade MP3s, and Joshua, at 14, was a leading player in this community. Respected as an expert, his knowledge was printed everywhere from Salon to Spin Magazine. Hoping to avoid the pitfalls of piracy, Joshua moved on to his next project. At 17, he spent a summer working in London. Joshua purchased a pay-as-you-go phone and heard a commercial ringtone for the first time. He knew it was inevitable that ringtones would come to the United States, but he didn’t want to wait. So, Joshua co-founded MobileSmarts, which was for a long time the largest ringtone distributor in the United States. Patching together a handful of Perl scripts and the .net domain that Nokia never bothered to register, a senior year bedroom project ultimately grew into a community with nearly 1 million members. After he graduated college, Joshua began to write and bartend. With a prominent ghost-writing gig under his belt, Joshua is now the editor of the influential nightlife industry blog, Good Night Mr. Lewis.  

About David Malin
Watching MobileSmarts take off, David decided to get in on the act. The home network that Joshua and the electrician wired allowed David to swipe the site’s source code. A talented musician, David used the code as the basis for a popular guitar tab directory. Joshua discovered the theft and a ‘ransacking’ occurred. At that moment David decided that he would learn to program himself, and like any younger brother, he vowed to be better than Joshua. Now a recent college graduate, David is a self-taught Rails pro. Mapfaced grew out of his senior year Computer Science project.

Changes Are Afoot.

In 1972 New York City debuted Massimo Vignelli's new subway map. The design was a dramatic departure from its predecessors. visualcomplexity explains:

In 1972, the renowned Italian designer Massimo Vignelli redesigned George Salomon's New York Subway map, which persisted until 1979, when superseded by Michael Hertz's design.

It was a marvelous conceptual map, and it was easy to read. It was a tool for navigating the subways, although not one for navigating the city streets. Out with the complicated tangle of geographically accurate train routes. No more messy angles. Instead, train lines would run at 45 and 90 angles only. Each line was represented by a color. Each stop represented by a dot. There was an obvious influence from the London Underground map, originally created by Harry Beck in 1933, however, Vignelli took it one step farther, in creating the now-famous intertwined wiring-diagram map of New York's vastly complicated subway lines.

Vignelli recently updated his map. Even the Airtrain is included. 500 signed prints have been produced, which are being sold by Men's Vogue to benefit Green Worker Cooperatives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to creating worker-owned and environmentally sound cooperatives in the South Bronx. The print costs $299. We suggest you grab one while you still can. We've got a blank wall awaiting our copy.

Mapfaced has been in private beta for about a month and during that time thousands of friends, family, and strangers (thanks to the guys at Thrillist) have put the site through its paces. Crawls have been built, comments have been left, and bugs have been squashed.

Our lead developer David, with an assist from an extremely talented Rails pro, is getting close to wrapping things up. Is the site complete? Of course not. Mapfaced will always be adding features (and trust us, there are many more in the pipeline), but we've reached the point when enough features are in place for us to welcome the general public. Why now? Well, it's a bit like our March Madness map...it's just too good not to share. About that March Madness map. Thanks to Gothamist, Urban Daddy, Citysearch/Imbible, & Eater for the positive coverage.

Check back soon for Opening Day.