About SLAM
SLAM, the Street License and Activity Map, shows what is licensed, pending and permitted around an address in a community district. It was built for community boards, to help them review liquor license applications. It began in 2018 as the SLA Mapper, named for the State Liquor Authority; the new name covers what it shows now.
Where the data comes from
Data last updated . 311 complaints run from 2022-01-01 through 2026-11-06. This prototype covers Manhattan Community District 1 and Brooklyn Community District 4.
SLAM shows facts as the City and State publish them. It does not decide whether a law or rule applies. Every term and how each number is counted are in the Glossary.
Open data
| Dataset | Used for | Portal | Rows updated |
|---|---|---|---|
Community Districts 5crt-au7u | Community district and Joint Interest Area boundaries. A record is in a district when its point falls inside the line; an address whose City point is within 100 feet of a line is listed in both districts. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Nov 2, 2026, 2:40 PM |
Current SLA Pending Licenses f8i8-k2gm | Liquor license applications SLA has received and not yet decided. | data.ny.gov | Nov 7, 2026, 8:32 PM |
Current Liquor Authority Active Licenses 9s3h-dpkz | Liquor licenses in effect now, with the dates and IDs SLA publishes for each. SLA publishes no hours or method of operation. | data.ny.gov | Nov 7, 2026, 8:35 PM |
Current SLA Inactive Licenses 6dg3-2z7i | Liquor licenses that have ended (shown on request). | data.ny.gov | Nov 7, 2026, 8:38 PM |
NYS Registered Retail Dealers of Adult-use Cannabis Products gttd-5u6y | Registered adult-use cannabis retail dealers. | data.ny.gov | Nov 7, 2026, 7:16 AM |
Current OCM Licenses jskf-tt3q | Cannabis licenses from the Office of Cannabis Management, plus applicants that hold proximity protection for a proposed dispensary. | data.ny.gov | Nov 7, 2026, 6:31 PM |
Dining Out NYC Locations fpeh-f7ci | Restaurants with outdoor dining approved under Dining Out NYC. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Nov 7, 2026, 8:30 AM |
NYC Permitted Event Information tvpp-9vvx | Street fairs, block parties and other permitted events. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Nov 7, 2026, 3:20 PM |
311 Service Requests from 2020 to Present erm2-nwe9 | 311 complaints at bars, clubs and restaurants, and outdoor dining complaints. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Nov 7, 2026, 9:39 PM |
DOHMH New York City Restaurant Inspection Results 43nn-pn8j | Health inspection results and letter grades. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Nov 6, 2026, 6:04 PM |
DOB NOW: Certificate of Occupancy pkdm-hqz6 | Certificates of occupancy filed in DOB NOW. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Nov 7, 2026, 4:00 PM |
Facilities Database ji82-xba5 | Schools (K-12), for the 200-foot distance list. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Jul 16, 2026, 1:33 PM |
Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) 64uk-42ks | Houses of worship and other religious property, for the 200-foot distance list. | data.cityofnewyork.us | Aug 24, 2026, 4:48 PM |
Other sources
- SLA license type and class definitions (Excel file), from SLA.
- SLA LAMP, linked from each liquor license.
- SLA Full Board meetings and SLA event calendar.
- The text of the 200- and 500-foot rules, from nysenate.gov: see the rules page.
- Each address links to BetaNYC's Boundaries Map, which lists every district that contains the address's point.
- Address points and BINs: the City's own address file (the Property Address Directory, as prepared by NYC Planning Labs for GeoSearch), matched inside SLAM's build. GeoSearch itself is asked only about addresses the file cannot match.
- Restaurant pages link to the Health Department's ABC Eats and to DOB's certificate of occupancy records.
SLAM is a folder of web pages and data files. Nothing you type is sent anywhere except address searches, which go to the City's GeoSearch service.
History
This history comes from SLAM's public GitHub repository: its README, commits, issues and pull requests since 2018. Issue numbers link to the original discussion.
2018: Built with and for community boards
Lindsay Poirier of BetaNYC made the first commit on June 29, 2018. New York City has 59 community boards, each with up to 50 appointed volunteers. For every liquor license application, a board gathers the license history, noise and underage drinking complaints, health inspections, the certificate of occupancy and sidewalk cafe information. These datasets share no common ID, so SLAM used location to bring them together.
The first issues, filed that summer, asked for a color-coded legend (#1), more liquor license filters (#2), a location search bar (#3), license types (#6), certificates of occupancy (#8) and a mobile-friendly layout (#17). In November 2018, an issue asked for the shapes of schools and churches on the map (#22).
On October 12, 2018, Lindsay Poirier presented "Helping District Offices Streamline License Reviews with SLAM" at CARTO's Spatial Data Science Conference. The talk described a tool built "using just very lightweight tools like Carto.js and Chart.js." Stacked noise complaints showed hotspots, and licenses expiring soon were colored differently.
2019: Keeping up with the data
SLA changed its dataset's column names, and SLAM's queries were updated to match (#27, August 2019). New issues asked for a point on the map for a searched address (#28) and for political and administrative boundaries (#30).
2020: A rebuild, and outdoor dining
Zhi Keng He rebuilt SLAM in Svelte (version 0.10e, #32, merged February 13, 2020). That month, community district and City Council district layers were added. In June and July 2020, SLAM added the City's Open Restaurants dataset and a layer of 311 complaints about open restaurants: NYPD social distancing and face covering complaints, DCA sidewalk cafe complaints and DOT outdoor dining complaints.
2021–2023: Upkeep
SLAM added links to SLA's LAMP map (October 2021). It was fixed after an SLA schema change and a change to the City's Geoclient service (January 2022), and moved to Vite and GeoSearch version 2 (January 2023).
Some ideas stayed open: where sidewalk cafes can and can't be (#23), addresses with large stacks of complaints (#29), a list of noisy locations (#31), a download of expired licenses (#34), an error message when one layer fails (#41), and zoning districts and use groups (#46).
November 2026: The map goes blank
By November 3, 2026, the first SLAM showed no data. BetaNYC's account with CARTO, the map service it ran on, was no longer available. The data requests failed and the street map showed "API KEY REQUIRED."
November 2026: SLAM v2
SLAM v2 is a rebuild with no hosted database and no API keys in the browser (#56). A small program downloads the data from NYC Open Data and data.ny.gov, places each record in today's community district lines, and saves it as web pages and data files. It is hosted on GitHub Pages and is rebuilt from open data each time it is published. It is also rebuilt every night. It brings back what boards used in the first SLAM (#58). It is a prototype: it is live at slam.beta.nyc, and we are testing it with two pilot districts, Manhattan Community District 1 and Brooklyn Community District 4. An address on a district line is listed in both districts (#88), and the pipeline knows the 12 Joint Interest Areas, the parks and airports outside every community district, so each can be listed as its own district when SLAM covers the whole city (#87, #93).
How we used AI tools
We are telling you this under BetaNYC's AI policy.
Writing code. BetaNYC staff built SLAM v2 with the help of Claude, an AI coding assistant made by Anthropic. BetaNYC staff set the goals, made the design decisions and decided what to merge. The AI tool drafted the code, tests and documentation, including this page. Changes were checked by automated tests and by a second, separate AI review. BetaNYC staff reviewed the published site on November 5, 2026, as BetaNYC's AI policy asks for anything AI helped make.
Learning from the first SLAM. To bring back what boards used, Claude read the first SLAM's code, README and GitHub issues. We transcribed the 2018 Spatial Data Science Conference talk, which is public on CARTO's YouTube channel, with Deepgram. Deepgram is an online speech-to-text service, so the talk's audio was sent to Deepgram. We also reviewed frames from that talk and from a 2020 BetaNYC "Open Data Journeys" training video. Claude summarized all of this into a list of features.
No AI on this site. Every record and count you see comes directly from open data, put together by ordinary code. Nothing here is generated, guessed or predicted by AI. Nothing you type is sent to an AI service.
The full code, and the record of how it changed, is public on GitHub.
Open-source tools
SLAM v2 is built on DuckDB (MIT), Svelte and SvelteKit (MIT) and MapLibre GL (BSD-3-Clause). The data program is written in Python and run with uv. The site is hosted on GitHub Pages.
Street map: the City's own vector basemap, NYC Basemap (SOURCE: NYC OTI, powered by Esri). If it can't load, the map switches to OpenFreeMap, built from © OpenStreetMap contributors data.