Loading JSON into a GeoDataFrame

Question

I'm having difficulty loading the following JSON containing GIS data (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/5rqd-h5ci.json) into a GeoDataFrame.

The following code fails when I try to set the geometry.

import requests
import geopandas as gpd
data = requests.get("https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/5rqd-h5ci.json")
gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(data.json())
gdf = gdf.set_geometry('the_geom')
gdf.head()

Answer 1

Setting the geometry fails because the geopandas.GeoDataFrame constructor doesn't appear to be built to handle JSON objects as python data structures. It therefore complains about the argument not being a valid geometry object. You have to parse it into something that geopandas.GeoDataFrame can understand, like a shapely.geometry.shape. Here's what ran without error on my side, Python 3.5.4:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import requests
import geopandas as gpd
from shapely.geometry import shape

r = requests.get("https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/5rqd-h5ci.json")
r.raise_for_status()

data = r.json()
for d in data:
    d['the_geom'] = shape(d['the_geom'])

gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(data).set_geometry('the_geom')
gdf.head()

A disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about Geo anything. I didn't even know these libraries and this kind of data existed until I installed geopandas to tackle this bounty and read a little bit of online documentation.