I made a little map of the places I have lived.

I got shapefiles of Hoboken and Jersey City streets from Hudson County, Manhattan streets from NYC Open Data, and San Francisco streets from their Open Data portal.

I used three dataframes, which is a pretty terrible and hacky way to approach this. The three layers and frames were all zoomed to different scales to line up the cities, so formatting the lines to make it look uniform was a challenge.

I manually parsed a bunch of streets, making the density of the grids consistent in each city, and connecting major thoroughfares between between them. 6th Avenue became Palisade Avenue pretty seamlessly. Merging south San Francisco's streets was not quite so elegant, but I blame San Francisco streets.

If anyone knows a smarter way to join lines to this effect, let me know.

Inspired by You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon.