What’s the deal with the “EM Stanton Catchment” neighborhood on Google Maps?

Have you ever looked up a location on Google Maps in South Philly and noticed a strange “neighborhood” called “EM Stanton Catchment” near Graduate Hospital?

Well, you’re not the only ones to notice it. While it certainly isn’t an official name for the neighborhood, it’s a boundary that started showing up on Google Maps at some point in the last year.

More on E.M. Stanton Catchment from PhillyMag:

Stanton is a good, small school with an active community, and it successfully resisted closure in 2012. But it doesn’t seem that anyone refers to that neighborhood as E.M. Stanton Catchment, or E.M. Stanton. Confusingly, there is already a Stanton neighborhood in Philly. It’s between Strawberry Mansion and Broad Street, per the city, and sort of overlaps with the Cecil B. Moore neighborhood. (Google Maps lists Stanton, too.)

Google declined an interview request from Philadelphia magazine regarding the E.M. Stanton Catchment neighborhood, but Mara Harris of the Maps team did answer a few questions about how Google gets its neighborhood data.

“The various types of data found on Google Maps comes from a wide range of sources,” Harris emailed. “Our basemap data (things like place names, neighborhoods, borders, and road networks) comes from a variety of authoritative public and commercial data sources, user contributions, and imagery references.”