Every Block Party in Philadelphia, Mapped
68,553 Philadelphia block party permits from 2006-2016, mapped block by block. Find yours on the interactive map.
68,553 block party permits, 2006 to 2016. Every single one is on this map. Filter by year. Filter by event type. Zoom in and find your block.
My block in Fairmount held its annual July 4th block party this year. I signed the petition — same as last year, same as the block did for years before I moved in. That got me looking for the permit records, and here they all are.
Where the parties are
The dot map is fun to explore, but the per-permit view doesn't tell a neighborhood story. Step back one level and look at the same data aggregated by zip code. Filter by year. Watch the heat move. The zip view counts 65,629 permits rather than 68,553, because 4.3% of them fall just outside the city's zip boundaries.
What I found
- The top five zip codes for block parties are 19140, 19143, 19132, 19121 and 19134 — North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia.
- July 4, 2009 is the busiest day in the data: 1,168 blocks held a party. The five biggest days are all Fourth of July or Labor Day weekends.
- One block — 3500 Ryan Ave in Northeast Philadelphia — hosted 71 parties in 10 years.
- Permits peaked in 2008 at 7,679, then settled at about 5,800–5,900 a year from 2013 on.
- 10,347 blocks hosted at least one permitted party in this window — roughly 1 in 4 blocks in the city.
- 247 serenades. That is a permit category, and it is in there.
Notes, Sources, and Methodology
Block party permit data was released by the Philadelphia Department of Streets to PlanPhilly in 2016 and covers January 2006 through June 2016. 2016 is partial — only 704 permits, because the data was pulled mid-year. The data is preserved in an academic replication archive at github.com/parksinchaisri/blockparties (paper: Sinchaisri & Jensen, "Community Vibrancy and its Relationship with Safety in Philadelphia," PLoS One 2021, CC BY 4.0). The same dataset was used in Tanika Raychaudhuri, Joshua H. Davidson & Michael Jones-Correa, "Shared Space and Civic Engagement: Block Parties and Voter Turnout in Philadelphia," Urban Affairs Review 61(3), 658–693 (2024), doi:10.1177/10780874241270041.
Every permit in the dataset was geocoded to a city block (100% match). 95.7% of permits fell inside a Philadelphia ZIP code boundary; the remaining 4.3% are likely on blocks at the city edge that fall just outside a 191xx zip. The map shows every individual permit as a single dot. At city zoom, dots cluster; zoom in and they spread out. The interactive was built with Leaflet and leaflet.markercluster, and the underlying data file (8.4 MB) is loaded once on page open. The denominator behind "1 in 4" is the Streets Department's own street inventory: 41,193 street segments, each the stretch of a single street between two cross streets — the same unit a block-party permit closes (Philadelphia street segments, City of Philadelphia GIS; street records last updated November 2021).
This map doesn't include 2017–2025 data. The Streets Department has not published permits as open data, citing the citizen names and home addresses in the application as the reason. The data I have is older but it's the only complete public copy I know of, and it's enough to say something real about how Philadelphians use their streets.