Change single patch color in geopandas

Question

Using this map of NYC I'd like to change Manhattan to be bright blue. But when I change the individual patch color of Manhattan all the other patch colors change too. This was unexpected to me.

How do you change the color of one individual patch?

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import geopandas as gpd
nybb = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_file('nybb.shp')


nybb_plot = nybb.plot()
for p_ny in nybb_plot.patches:
    p_ny.set_color("#111111")
    p_ny.set_alpha(0.6)

for line in nybb_plot.lines:
    line.set_linewidth(0.25)
    line.set_alpha(0.9)
    line.set_color("#d3d3d3")

manhattan = nybb.loc[nybb.BoroName == "Manhattan"]

man_plot = manhattan.plot()
for p_mh in man_plot.patches:
    p_mh.set_color("#33ccff")

plt.show()

Answer 1

A possible solution is using geopandas.plotting.plot_multipolygon to specifically add only one geometry object with blue colors to the existing figure:

from geopandas.plotting import plot_multipolygon
manhattan = nybb[nybb.BoroName == "Manhattan"]
plot_multipolygon(nybb_plot, manhattan.geometry.iloc[0], facecolor="#33ccff", edgecolor='none')

This gives me:

The reason your above approach does not work, is because geopandas adds the second plot to the same axes as the first plot (and this axes is returned from plot()). So nybb_plot and man_plot are referring to the same object, and so you do update all patches the second time.

---

Note that in the development version, the second plot will not automatically added anymore to the first, but a new figure will be created.