NYC Neighborhoods: A Mobile Reference Map for New Yorkers on the Go
tl;dr: download the NYC Neighborhoods app for iOS or Android
There’s a moment that every New Yorker knows. You come up the subway stairs into a part of the city you don’t know that well — maybe you were invited to a party, or a friend texted you a restaurant recommendation, or you’ve just been wandering around on foot for a while. You look up and down the street, get your bearings, and think: what neighborhood is this, exactly?
Google Maps will show you a neighborhood label floating on the screen, but it won’t show you where that neighborhood starts or ends, the other names it may go by, or the smaller named areas nestled within it. It will show you you’re near Lenox Hill, but the words “Upper East Side” aren’t there at all.
I found myself searching for neighborhood maps in the mobile web browser, and there are tons of them that show up as images, but usually at borough scale. You can’t see the street names, or really look up where you are right now.
There was no easily acessible, digital neighborhood reference map for New York City. So I built one.
NYC Neighborhoods is a free mobile app — available now on iOS and Android, with a web version at nycneighborhoods.app — that shows you a map of every neighborhood in all five boroughs and tells you which one you’re standing in right now.
First, Neighborhood boundaries aren’t official
Let me be upfront about something: neighborhood boundaries in New York City are not official. There is no authoritative source, no city agency that draws these lines. That makes any neighborhood map inherently an act of interpretation — a synthesis of historical usage, local consensus, real estate marketing, Wikipedia editors, and Reddit arguments. New neighborhoods get invented, old ones get rebranded, and everyone is convinced they know where the real boundary is. I went in with eyes open. This map is my best attempt to reconcile all of that, and it will never be perfect. No neighborhood map ever is.
Why This Needed to Exist
NYC is enormous. There are over 300 neighborhoods (the app actually includes 386 at the time this post was written) across five very different boroughs, ranging from dense, block-by-block Manhattan to sprawling residential Queens. A map that fits all of that on a single screen is so zoomed out it’s useless for answering the question “where am I right now?” You need to be at street level for that.
There’s plenty of prior art in this space. The NYT published a beautiful crowdsourced neighborhood map in 2024. There’s locality.nyc, cityneighborhoods.nyc, and a detailed Google My Maps dataset built by Reddit users that went viral in 2025 — 282 neighborhoods across all five boroughs, painstakingly assembled. The comments on that one were full of people debating whether their corner was really in Carroll Gardens or Cobble Hill, which tells you everything about how much New Yorkers care about this.
But none of these let you zoom to street level and see exactly which polygon you’re standing in. That’s a problem perfectly suited for interactive web and mobile maps, where the user has control of the zoom level and the device’s location is readily available. All the pieces were there. The missing piece was the dataset itself — a clean, contiguous, street-level set of neighborhood polygons covering all of New York City. That didn’t really exist, so I had to build it.
The Map
The core of the app is a set of hand-crafted polygons that cover the entire landmass of New York City, with no gaps and no overlaps. Every block is in exactly one neighborhood at all times. This means airports, large parks, and other non-residential areas end up as their own top-level neighborhoods — the map will tell you that you’re in JFK Airport or Prospect Park, because we always want to tell you something. You’re always somewhere.
A locate me button snaps the map to your current position and can keep it centered as you move. Your current neighborhood name appears in a pill at the bottom of the screen, so you can glance at it without studying the map.
Labels are rendered at every zoom level using a combination of centroid and edge placement, so the map is readable whether you’re looking at all of Brooklyn or a single city block.
The Neighborhood Hierarchy
One thing I put a lot of thought into is the two-tier neighborhood structure. A flat list of neighborhoods for all of NYC leads quickly to ambiguity — not just about borders, but about the nature of the places themselves.
Take Midtown Manhattan as an example. Is Times Square a neighborhood or an intersection? Yes. Is it in the Theater District? Also yes. Are both of those in Midtown? Yes again. The nesting goes several layers deep, and a single-level map can’t express that.
In the end, I split Midtown into Midtown West and Midtown East as top-level neighborhoods, and made places like Hell’s Kitchen, the Diamond District, the Garment District, Tudor City, Turtle Bay, Murray Hill, and Sutton Place into sub-neighborhoods within them. Times Square and the Theater District live in there too. The hierarchy lets the app communicate nuance that flat maps can’t — you can be in Midtown West and simultaneously in Hell’s Kitchen, and both of those facts are true and useful.
This pattern repeats across the city: Hunters Point is in Long Island City. Manhattan Valley is in the Upper West Side. I’m sure I got some of these wrong, so if you have strong opinions I’d love to hear them.
About the Data
I want to be transparent about where this came from, because I think that’s the honest thing to do.
The base geometries started as a Zillow open data release from 2017. It was a great starting point — contiguous coverage of all five boroughs — but it had gaps, inaccuracies, and no sub-neighborhood layer at all. From there I’ve been manually editing: slicing polygons, merging others, adding sub-neighborhoods, and making judgment calls about contested boundaries. (I use geojson.io heavily for manual polygon editing)
For neighborhood names and coverage, I cross-referenced what I had against Wikipedia’s lists of NYC neighborhoods, filling in gaps and adjusting boundaries where they butted up against other reasonable soures of information. A lot of Wikipedia neighborhood pages actually include a polygon boundary in their geographic data — useful as a reference, though if you try to use them all as-is, they overlap considerably. So those were inputs, not gospel.
Beyond Wikipedia, my sources have been a patchwork of immediate feedback from New Yorkers using the app (my wife telling me that Concord and Grasmere are two neighborhoods, not one as the original dataset had them), feedback submitted by beta testers (“Holliswood is not a sub neighborhood within Hollis”), and an impressive volume of Reddit threads where users argue in great detail about exactly these questions.
This is a best-effort dataset. These are not official boundaries (official boundaries don’t exist, which is sort of the whole point), and I’ve certainly gotten things wrong. The beauty of it is that it’s all digital and can be changed. The voting feature exists specifically to help me figure out where.
The dataset is available on GitHub, where you can see every change I’ve made to the original Zillow open dataset. It’s licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Use it, contribute to it, build on it.
A note for Staten Islanders: The SI data is largely inherited from the original Zillow source, and there’s significantly less documentation online about Staten Island neighborhood geography than there is for the other four boroughs. Even the viral New York Times map shows an asterisk about minimal data collected for most of SI. If you live there and have strong opinions about the lines you see on the map, I need to hear from you. Vote, and use the feedback option to leave specifics.
Features, Briefly
Beyond the map and location features, a few other things worth mentioning:
Anonymous voting lets users flag whether a neighborhood boundary looks right or wrong. No login required, votes expire after 30 days, so with enough users I’ll have a rolling signal about which boundaries are working. Even a thumbs up is useful — it tells me not to touch it.
The random neighborhood chooser is a feature I’ve wanted to build for a long time, ever since I had the idea for a “subway roulette” app that would dare you to go explore a random station. My daughter had a day off school recently and we rolled the dice — it landed on Jackson Heights, Queens. We had a great breakfast at a local diner and wandered around for while. I hope you’ll do the same and find a new corner of the city to explore.
Search handles both neighborhood names and addresses.
The info panel shows a brief text overview plus links to each neighborhood’s Wikipedia article and subreddit, if one exists.
How It’s Built
The iOS and Android apps are built with Flutter using the Mapbox Maps SDK, which lets me maintain a single codebase for both platforms. The web version at nycneighborhoods.app is built with Mapbox GL JS. All three share a common map style that I’ve spent many hours designing and refining — getting the colors, label sizes, and line weights to feel just right at every zoom level is more of an art than a science, and it’s one of the parts of this project I’m most proud of.
Go Try It
If you’ve ever come up from underground and wondered what block of the city you’d landed on, this is for you. Download it on iOS or Android, or try the web version at nycneighborhoods.app.
And please — vote on the boundaries. Tell me what’s wrong. The map is only as good as the feedback it collects, and I’d genuinely love to hear from people who know their neighborhoods well.
