Talk:459 West 18th Street

A fact from 459 West 18th Street appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 16 August 2016 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the architects of 459 West 18th Street (pictured) in Manhattan's West Chelsea neighborhood also developed it to make sure it was built as they had designed it?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2016/August. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/459 West 18th Street.

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Lot area

Latest comment: 8 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

"The building is located on a 31,000-square-foot (2,900 m2) L-shaped lot ..." I can't prove that's wrong, or find what's right instead (if I could, I'd change it rather than merely ask about it), but can that possibly be correct? I don't find the lot area in cited reference [3]. (I DO find two different areas for the building, which is disturbing.) Looking at the satellite map, the building appears to fill the site completely. It's an 11 story building. So how can the site area be greater than the total building area? In cited reference [6] the lot is said to be 50 feet wide, 50 feet deep on the west side, 100 feet deep on the east side; I might believe 3,750 sq. ft., but mostly I just don't know. I tried to look up the lot area in New York City tax records but I don't know how.

Also, when I used the coordinates to find the building on Google Maps, they took me to the building next door to the east. 40°44'40.5"N 74°00'21.0"W seems to be closer. Someone might want to check that? Google Maps could be wrong. Also, if it's a rule not to use decimals of a second, it may be impossible to fix, because 40°44'40"N is in the street in front of the building, and 40°44'41"N is behind the building. It's a small target.Gms3591 (talk) 14:27, 16 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Gms3591: I haven't the time at the moment to run down where that lot size came from exactly. I do wonder if someone writing about it confused the building's interior square footage with its lot size. There is a frustrating lack of exactitude in a lot of the sources.

As for your second issue, the building infobox requires that coordinates be input in dms format. The GeoHack page then goes with the equivalent decimal-degree format, which I have noticed often shifts the desired location somewhat as the resulting dms coords are less exact (I really wonder if we should shift to What3words as that is designed to avoid that sort of confusion and is much easier for non-cartographically oriented people to use). Daniel Case (talk) 17:59, 16 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

@Daniel Case:Thanks for your attention to this matter. I agree the sources are frustratingly inexact. As for What3Words, wow, that's a real thing. I saw that used on a TV show recently -- I think The Last Ship -- and assumed it was the writers' invention.Gms3591 (talk) 14:40, 19 August 2016 (UTC)Reply

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