Where to Get Your Drinks Downtown
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — 
As I teased yesterday, I've been messing around with info on Downtown liquor licenses this week. Did you know that in the seven zip codes that serve Downtown (there's a good guessing question -- can you name all seven?) there are 467 liquor licenses outstanding?
I grabbed the license info from the California Alcoholic Beverage Control and ran it through a script to parse the HTML tables into tab-delimited data. I then took that and fed it into Google Earth, which geocoded all the addresses and gave me this super-handy guide to who can serve Downtown. It's a kmz file, so you'll need Google Earth to open it. The file contains only about 435 of the entries at the moment -- the remaining 30 didn't geocode successfully.
As an FYI, Downtown's seven zipcodes are: 90012, 90013, 90014, 90015, 90017, 90021, 90071.
Brian Humphrey on November 10, 2006, at 11:01AM – #1
Eric:
You are simply amazing. How I wish we could harness such skill and ingenuity to tackle the geospatial data at our office.
Please keep up the great work, which continues to inspire more people than you might imagine. Though I have no need to imbibe, I do imagine that I could use your dataset to acquire a might fine sasparilla next time I get thirsty downtown.
Again Eric, thanks for your blogging efforts, which always make an interesting read.
Respectfully Yours in Safety and Service,
Brian Humphrey Firefighter/Specialist Public Service Officer Los Angeles Fire Department
Jason McCabe on November 11, 2006, at 09:59AM – #2
This shows up as code in Safar and Firefox on my Mac.
Eric Richardson (@blogdowntown) on November 11, 2006, at 04:41PM – #3
Jason: Do you have Google Earth installed? If not, take care of that first. If so, try ctrl-clicking and saving the .kmz file to your desktop and opening it from there.