Best cities to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day

In my younger years, I enjoyed celebrating St. Patrick’s Day in Savannah, GA. Did you know the city dyes the fountain water green and has a parade that attracts over 400,000 people? It is now time for me to find additional cities to celebrate the holiday.

Based on the DriveTheNation website, there are five best U.S. cities to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. I couldn’t resist adding those cities to a SAS/GRAPH map.

Maybe, next year I will head to Chicago (one of my favorite cities) to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. However, you can’t go wrong with Boston, New York, or San Francisco!

If you want to learn more about creating maps in SAS, check out the five-session Live Web class Producing Maps with SAS/GRAPH. Next offering of the class is April 21-25, 2014.

The following program created the above graph:

data work.cities(drop=city statecode);
   length xsys ysys hsys position when $ 1 
          function color style $ 8 text $50;
   retain xsys ysys '2' hsys 'D' function 'label' when 'a'; 
   set maps.uscity(keep=x y city statecode) end=last;
   where (city = 'San Francisco' and statecode = 'CA')
      or (city = 'Savannah'   and statecode = 'GA')
      or (city = 'New York' and statecode = 'NY')
      or (city = 'Chicago' and statecode = 'IL')
      or (city = 'Boston'  and statecode = 'MA');
   text='M'; color='green'; size=14; style='Marker'; position='5'; output;
   text=city; style='Arial/bold';
   if statecode='CA' then position='9'; 
   else if statecode='MA' then position='2'; else position='8'; output;
   if last then do;
      text='Note: Map produced with SAS/GRAPH'; style='Arial/italic'; size=12;
   position='5'; x=0.22; y=-0.22; output; 
   end;
run;
 
ods html path='c:\temp' file='StPatricksDay.html' nogtitle nogfootnote;
goptions reset=all border;
 
proc gmap data=maps.us map=maps.us anno=work.cities;
   id state;
   choro state / nolegend levels=1 statistic=first 
                 coutline=white woutline=2;
   pattern1 c=lightgray v=s;
   title1 c=green h=14pt f='Arial' bold 
          "Best Cities to Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day";
   title2 c=green h=12pt f='Arial' bold
          "http://drivethenation.com/best-cities-to-celebrate-st-patricks-day/";
run;
quit;
 
ods html close;