Rainbows End In Brooklyn For Coronavirus Online Scavenger Hunt

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Quick, there's a rainbow by a Park Slope grocery store. And another six along Prospect Park West. And almost too many to count in Carroll Gardens.

These aren't the rainbows that burst forth in the sky after rain, although they have popped up amid another type of storm — the coronavirus outbreak and shutdown.

Brooklynites and, now, people all over the world are drawing rainbows, posting them in windows and sharing the locations on Google Maps in a sort of coronavirus-era scavenger hunt for children and their families.

Anna Grotzky, a Cobble Hill yoga instructor and life coach, is quick to say she didn't start the phenomenon, but she did give it an online home by setting up the "Rainbow Connection" map.

"I think by having this out there it gives everybody that little sense of excitement and hope and connection that we’re craving right now," she said.

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Grotzky said she saw rainbows sprout up over her neighborhood as the city shut down bit-by-bit for the coronavirus outbreak. Neighbors put them up to give children and families a little bit of brightness during their walks outside, she said.

Someone then posted that the rainbows' locations tracked.

"I saw this post and thought I know how to do that,” Grotzky said with a laugh.

So, Grotzky decided to use some of her computer expertise to create a digital treasure map. With a few mouse clicks and keystrokes, she turned Google Maps pins into rainbows that covered her neighborhood.

Then the colorful icons spread across Brooklyn.

"It’s been incredible," she said. "Even the first week alone, we easily had 500-1000 rainbows on the map. It was very much concentrated in Brooklyn."

But the rainbows didn't stay confined to Brooklyn. They spread across the city and the country.

Grotzky marveled at rainbow pins showing up in Savannah, Georgia, Washington, D.C. and further out. One recently popped up in Russia.

These sort of personalized maps boomed in popularity as the coronavirus spread. Google My Maps creations — of which the rainbow map is one — grow by 1 billion in the last four months, a release states.

For her part, Grotzky isn't surprised that a rainbow scavenger hunt would prove a ray of sunshine in dark times.

"A rainbow is magical to people," she said. "You don’t get to see one every day."

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