Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Looking for where William Burroughs lived on the Bowery? There's an app for that now


West Village resident Christopher Otto has created a new app for iPhones that uses GPS to show nearby cultural locations in downtown Manhattan. It currently has almost 350 locations, with links to Wikipedia and YouTube to provide more extensive information than could be included in the app itself.

In some locations like "The Bunker" where Burroughs lived on Bowery, or Quentin Crisp's apartment, you can see the person themselves in the building talking about his or her life in archival video.

"I was inspired to make it after reading 'Low Life' by Luc Sante while staying in a historic building in the West Village and finding myself forgetting what NYC was like before places like Superdive came along," Otto said in an e-mail. "My hope is that someone shopping in SoHo might read about Gordon Matta-Clark, or discover La Monte Young, and be inspired to do something interesting."

The app is free, though it includes iAds and Otto gets a small percentage of the iTunes and Amazon sales.

The direct link to iTunes is here.

There's basic website up explaining the features.
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