Pizzanomics: The intersection of where you live and what you pay for pizza
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
This may soon be known as the most important infographic on the Internet
Today, NPR went ahead and published what may soon be known as the most important infographic to ever grace the Internet. Well, in terms of pizza that is.
Economists at NPR's Planet Money blog compiled data sets of the median pricing for "plain cheese" pizzas and estimates of how many places are peddling their pies in 237 neighborhoods across five major U.S. cities. The data, collected from Grubhub's Seamless app, made for a nice little graphic showing how much dough it takes to get a pie in 57 different Philly neighborhoods .
The most expensive pie in town comes from, perhaps unsurprisingly, the rapidly gentrifying Graduate Hospital area, with an average price of nearly $15. The cheapest ’za can apparently be found in part of Southwest Philly and the Oak Lanes, where the average pizza goes for under $8 dollars.
Roxborough/Manayunk, Fairmount, South Philadelphia, and North Philly/Oak Lane are apparently the most saturated with pizza places. The biggest surprise could be that Fishtown, the neighborhood that hosts the likes of Pizza Brain and Pizzeria Beddia, is ranked as a veritable pizza desert. It's worth noting that Philly has the cheapest pizza among the cities studied on average.
The graphic also includes some fun apocryphal place names that tend to pop up when out-of-towners try to list Philadelphia's many, poorly defined neighborhoods, like "Albany Park," "Haverford North" and "Cheltenham," it's the thought that counts.
Now, if this were a perfect pizza world where groups of savvy pizza statisticians got together and made the perfect pizza-related data chart, we'd have a graph that also included quality ratings as well as size. But, alas, we're left in the darkness of pizza despair wondering only what could have been. If only.
