NYC Gallery Tracker

Live site: nycgallerytracker.com

A free, interactive map of New York City's art galleries — about 235 of them across all five boroughs — that checks every gallery's website each day and flags the ones that have posted something new. Open it to see what's on near you, plan a gallery walk, or get a weekly email of new shows.

What it does

• Interactive map of galleries in Chelsea, the Lower East Side, Tribeca, SoHo, Bushwick, Williamsburg, DUMBO and beyond, with a filterable directory underneath.
• Daily change detection. A scraper visits every gallery's homepage and records when its content actually changes, so "new" means a new show or announcement, not a rotated banner.
• Weekly "new shows" digest, published as a permanent page under /new-shows/ and sent by email to subscribers every Monday.
• Neighborhood and borough pages (/galleries/) and walking routes (/routes/) for planning an afternoon of gallery-hopping.
• Installable as a phone app (PWA), with optional notifications.

How it works

Everything runs on a schedule in GitHub Actions and is served as static files by Netlify. There is no server or database — the data lives in this repo.

GitHub Actions (daily, 12:00 UTC)
  scraper.py        → checks every gallery site, records which ones changed
  validate_data.py  → stops the build if any data looks wrong
  build_site.py     → regenerates every page and sitemap.xml
  commit + push     → Netlify deploys the update automatically
  (Mondays) render_weekly_digest.py → emails the weekly digest

If validation fails, the site keeps the previous day's data rather than publishing bad data.

Key files

File	Purpose
index.html	The homepage: map, directory, sign-up
data/galleries.json	The gallery dataset (GeoJSON) plus change-tracking state
scraper.py	Daily change detection across all gallery sites
validate_data.py	Sanity checks (e.g. coordinates that don't match the address)
build_site.py	Runs all the page generators in the right order
render_*.py	Page generators: gallery cards, area pages, guides, routes, digests
site_common.py	Shared header, footer, styles and analytics for generated pages
build_gallery_list.py, fetch_google_places.py	One-off tools used to build the gallery list
.github/workflows/	Scheduled scrape/build and manual digest send

Running it locally

Requires Python 3.11.

pip install -r requirements.txt
python scraper.py        # optional — hits every gallery website
python validate_data.py
python build_site.py
python -m http.server 8000   # then open http://localhost:8000

The one-off data tools need API keys in environment variables (MAPBOX_TOKEN, GOOGLE_PLACES_KEY); sending the digest needs BUTTONDOWN_API_KEY. None of these are needed to build or view the site.

Built with

Python (requests, BeautifulSoup, pandas) · Mapbox GL JS · GitHub Actions · Netlify · Buttondown

Corrections

Gallery missing, closed, or in the wrong place? Please open an issue.