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In New York, the answer to the seemingly simple question “Where do you live?” can be contentious.
Is your Queens apartment in Astoria, or is it actually in Long Island City? Are you in the East Village of Manhattan or just far enough west to be in Greenwich Village? Debates like these have endured for ages, largely because there is no map that captures all of the city’s neighborhoods and their borders.
“There are a million ways to slice New York City that are official, but those maps don’t show the reality of how we see it generally,” said Larry Buchanan, a graphics editor and reporter for The New York Times.
Late last year, Mr. Buchanan and a team of Times editors began working on an ambitious project: to create a map of the entire city using only reader input. To accomplish this, they invited New Yorkers to identify the names of their neighborhoods and to outline their borders. The invitation provoked a strong reaction: More than 37,000 readers responded with maps and comments.
The aggregated responses inform a detailed, interactive map of the city’s neighborhoods and their nebulous boundaries. The map, which was published online last month, features more than 400 neighborhood names, and disagreements abound.
“My favorite thing is that the map itself is, at its core, a map of uncertainty,” said Mr. Buchanan, who designed and produced the project, along with Josh Katz, Rumsey Taylor and Eve Washington. They are members of the Digital News Design and Upshot teams, which use data and visuals to inform articles.
The technology behind the map was initially built to accompany another Times article. Last year, a state law that prohibited guns in Times Square required city officials to define the area’s borders; they drew a neighborhood that stretched from Sixth to Ninth Avenues and from West 40th to West 53rd Streets.
Some New Yorkers were skeptical of the city’s generous dimensions. In the newsroom, the borders spurred an idea for a quirky project about the area’s borders. Mr. Buchanan and Ms. Washington created an online interface that allowed readers to outline what they thought constituted Times Square. The drawings would be combined with other reader-drawn polygons to approximate a consensus of the neighborhood. That feature was never published, but the technology became a foundation for The Upshot’s project and was eventually scaled up to include all five boroughs.
The resulting map is colorful. Bright, solid sections reflect broad agreement on the name of an area. Hazy ones indicate places where there’s little (or no) consensus. In Brooklyn, for example, much of Greenpoint is currently a bright yellow. In places where Greenpoint meets Williamsburg, however, the yellow is imbued with hues of red or blue, signaling disagreement about the neighborhoods’ borders.
Presenting the vast ambiguity was one of the project’s objectives, and Mr. Buchanan said he had relished the debate. Some readers noted the emergence of newer neighborhoods, like Alphabet City (considered by some to be part of the East Village) or Kingsbridge (a neighborhood within Riverdale in the Bronx). Others fervently insisted that certain neighborhoods, such as East Williamsburg, NoLIta and Hamilton Heights, did not exist at all — at least, not in name.
“It’s all made up, so in some sense everyone is right,” Mr. Buchanan said of the results. “It allows for neighborhoods that once were neighborhoods to not exist anymore and for new ones to be made out of thin air.”
Every label used to identify a place — except for streets or city parks with official names — came directly from the data collected from readers, not from pre-existing maps or from websites like Google and StreetEasy.
An early goal was to be as inclusive as possible since it became evident that the project had struck a chord with so many New Yorkers. If more than 1 percent of people who live in a neighborhood use a name to describe it, that name is included on the map.
“It’s one of those fun little questions about identity,” Mr. Katz said of the project, “where you live, where you come from and how you define that.”
Like many Upshot projects, the goal was to create a novel experience using technology; every decision, Mr. Buchanan said, was made in service of a larger journalistic picture about New York’s changing layout.
The editors hope that readers will continue to submit data; the team will incorporate additional responses into the map. Since it was published, more than 7,500 readers have sent in new submissions. Some have documented neighborhoods marked by immigrant communities, such as Loisaida in Manhattan, Little Yemen in the Bronx and Little Haiti in Brooklyn.
“It is a living document,” Ms. Washington said of the map. “It can be kept alive for as long as people keep responding.”
Contribute to The Times’s map of New York City by drawing an outline of your neighborhood here.
John Otis
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