This map shows 857,000 buildings across the five boroughs, colored by age. Press play to watch New York build itself, from the 1600s to today.
Filters, spotlights and overlays live in the left panel; the color buttons at the bottom switch between age, height, type and borough.
A note on accuracy
Construction dates before roughly 1950 are highly unreliable — the city's records were never meant as a historical archive. Full caveats under Methodology & Definitions below.
Building data comes from MapPLUTO (Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output), published by the NYC Department of City Planning. MapPLUTO merges tax lot data from the Department of Finance with building and zoning information from the Department of Buildings and City Planning. The data is pulled from the live MapPLUTO API and was last refreshed July 26, 2026; it contains approximately 857,000 building records.
YearBuilt before 1920. Includes colonial, 19th-century, and early 20th-century construction. Dates this old are highly unreliable; the city's DOB permit records do not go back this far, so many buildings are tagged with later dates or have no date at all.YearBuilt between 1920 and 1949. The interwar building boom: Art Deco skyscrapers, the first public housing, and the outer-borough apartment expansion. More reliable than earlier eras but still imperfect.YearBuilt between 1950 and 1979. The postwar era: Robert Moses highways, towers-in-the-park, and suburban-style development in the outer boroughs. Generally reliable.YearBuilt between 1980 and 2009. Late 20th-century development through the post-9/11 building boom. Reliable.YearBuilt of 2010 or later. The most recent wave of construction. Most reliable era in the dataset.YearBuilt is 0 or missing. Approximately 39,000 lots.Important: Dates before roughly 1950 are highly unreliable. The city's building records (MapPLUTO YearBuilt) come from DOB permit filings, which were not designed as a historical archive. Much of New York was built in the 1800s, but the data dramatically undercounts pre-1900 construction. (More, more)
NumFloors = 1 or 0 (defaulted to 1).NumFloors between 2 and 6. Includes most row houses and walk-up apartment buildings.NumFloors between 7 and 20.NumFloors between 21 and 49.NumFloors of 50 or more.Floor counts are self-reported by building owners to the Department of Finance and may not always reflect current conditions.
Derived from the first character of MapPLUTO's BldgClass field, which uses the NYC Department of Finance building classification system.
Derived from MapPLUTO BoroCode: 1 = Manhattan, 2 = Bronx, 3 = Brooklyn, 4 = Queens, 5 = Staten Island.
Address field. Title-cased for display. Some lots have no address recorded.LotArea (in square feet), clamped to a reasonable range.The optional City-owned land overlay shows the 14,940 tax lots the city owns or leases, drawn from the NYC Department of City Planning's City Owned and Leased Properties (COLP) dataset and joined to MapPLUTO for lot boundaries, size and zoning. At close zoom each lot renders as its actual parcel outline over the building footprints, so you can see what stands (or doesn't) on city land; at city scale, lots render as dots. Parcels are sorted into four housing-readiness categories — no current use, already residential, other active use, and parks & recreation — following the framing of the NYU Furman Center's interactive maps of city-owned land. For no-current-use lots zoned for housing as-of-right, the tooltip shows a rough capacity (lot area × residential FAR ÷ 1,000 sq ft) — a back-of-envelope figure, not a project estimate. The tooltip also flags lots the city has marked for possible disposition, and lots the city leases rather than owns. Lots with multiple recorded uses are shown by their most active one; multi-part lots render their largest piece. A fuller version, with filters and a 3D capacity view, lives at the standalone city-owned land map.
The optional Ghost buildings overlay draws the footprints of roughly 40,000 demolished buildings from the city's Building Footprints Historic dataset, the companion file to the Building Footprints data that supplies this map's building shapes. The overlay is tied to the timeline: each demolished building renders solid (colored by its construction year) while it stood, then fades to a pale outline once the timeline passes its demolition year. Records are deduplicated by building identification number, keeping the most recently edited footprint version. Where a record lacks a demolition year (fewer than 1 percent), the year it was last edited is used instead. Important caveat: the city only began maintaining digital footprints in the mid-1990s, so this overlay captures demolitions from 1996 onward — it is a record of the recent past, not of everything New York City has ever torn down. Construction years are unknown for about a quarter of these buildings; they are shown as standing from the start of the timeline until their demolition.
The optional Zoning reference layer draws the city's 5,416 primary zoning districts, from the New York City Department of City Planning's zoning districts layer (nyzd) — the same primary layer behind DCP's ZoLa map, pulled from the department's live map service and retrieved July 22, 2026. The layer is continuous: every square foot of the city carries exactly one primary district, and it extends over water to the federal pierhead lines, which is why the tint runs past the shoreline.
Districts are grouped into five categories: residential, commercial, manufacturing, mixed use and mapped parkland. The colors here are all cool — blues, teals and violets — rather than the warm zoning palette used on the standalone city-owned land map, because on this map the buildings themselves are amber and a warm zoning wash underneath them is unreadable. The 62 paired districts (M1-2/R6A and kin, created by rezonings like Greenpoint–Williamsburg and Gowanus) are recorded as manufacturing in the source data; because they permit housing alongside industry, this map gives them their own mixed-use category. Hovering any building shows the district it sits in; hovering open ground shows the district alone.
Important: zoning describes what may be built, not what is standing. Much of New York predates its current zoning and could not be rebuilt as it stands today — those buildings are legal but non-conforming. Reading the amber footprints against the zoning tint is a way to see that gap.
Two things ZoLa shows that this layer does not: commercial overlays (the C1 and C2 strips that put retail on residential avenues) and special purpose districts. Both are separate datasets. District boundaries here are simplified to roughly one-meter precision for file size, so they are not survey-accurate; check ZoLa or the zoning maps before relying on any specific lot line.
The Height color mode uses HEIGHTROOF from the city's building footprints: the measured height of the roof above ground level, in feet, derived photogrammetrically from aerial and street-level imagery. The city reports 95 percent of footprint measurements as accurate to within two feet. It is available for 812,000 of the 857,000 lots here (94.7 percent); lots without a measurement render dim gray rather than being estimated.
This replaces the earlier approach of coloring by MapPLUTO's NumFloors, which is self-reported and, as noted above, imperfect. The Height filter still works in floors, because its categories are named in floors — so single-story buildings remain filterable exactly as before. Where a lot carries several structures, the height shown is that of the tallest building on it; garages and sheds are excluded so a detached garage never defines a lot's height. The color ramp is logarithmic, because a 35-foot rowhouse and a 1,400-foot tower have to share it.
Not every footprint is a building. The city's FEAT_CODE field sorts the 1.08 million footprints by structure type, and 213,460 of them — about one in five — are garages, alongside 132 gas station canopies, 119 skybridges, and smaller counts of storage tanks, temporary structures and cantilevered buildings. Only 868,460 are coded as buildings. The Garages & sheds filter hides the non-building structures at street zoom; it never touches anything the city codes as a building, so one-story and single-family houses always remain visible. Where a structure is not an ordinary building, its type appears in the tooltip.
The Future buildings spotlight is the mirror image of Ghost buildings: rather than what has been demolished, it shows what the city expects to gain and lose next. It draws 468 structures coded as under construction, permitted-but-unbuilt (the city maps a placeholder for these), or marked for construction; and 67 buildings marked for demolition. Caveat: these are administrative records, not guarantees — a permitted building may never rise, and a building marked for demolition may be reprieved. A further 61 records the city labels "investigate construction" or "investigate demolition," meaning it is not certain the change occurred, are excluded here rather than presented as fact. Because these records track the footprints file, they update weekly.
The Architects & styles spotlight draws the 38,105 buildings in the Landmarks Preservation Commission's Individual Landmark and Historic District Building Database — every individual landmark plus every building inside a historic district. For each, the LPC recorded the architect or builder, the architectural style, the primary material, the original use and a construction date; all of that appears on hover, and is appended to the ordinary building tooltip when the layer is on.
This is the only citywide source that names architects, and its limits should be plain: it covers roughly 4 percent of the city's buildings — the designated ones — and for about a quarter of those the LPC recorded the architect as "not determined," which this map shows rather than hides. It names 4,689 distinct architects; the most prolific are not the famous ones but the rowhouse and apartment-house firms — Louis Berger & Company, Axel Hedman, Benjamin Driesler, Thom & Wilson, George F. Pelham. Buildings are joined by exact point-in-polygon against the LPC's own footprints, not by address matching. Dates here are the LPC's research, which is generally better than the permit-derived dates used elsewhere on this map, and often approximate ("c. 1912").
The City calls it line on the building tooltip comes from CommonPlace, published by the Office of Technology and Innovation. CommonPlace is the gazetteer behind Geosupport, the city's geocoder — the file that lets a city system resolve a name like "PS 61" to a building, a street segment and a coordinate. Its stated purpose, per the agency's own data dictionary, is to aid dispatch, so it covers what agencies get called out to rather than what is notable: a Home Depot and a park comfort station are both in it, most storefronts are not, and Yankee Stadium is missing entirely. Roughly 1 percent of the city's buildings carry a name here — but they are disproportionately the ones worth naming, which is why 338 5 Avenue can tell you it is the Empire State Building.
Three things to know about how it is used. PLUTO tax lots key on BBL and CommonPlace keys on BIN, so there is no join between them — names are matched to the lot under the cursor by proximity, within 45 meters. That radius is deliberately tight: a wider one would confidently mislabel neighbors on a dense block, so the tradeoff runs the other way, and hovering the far end of a very large building can return no name at all even though the building is in the file. Where several names sit on one building, the source's own complex-versus-constituent flag decides: hovering Grand Central returns the terminal rather than the gift shop two meters closer. And NYPD-sourced entries other than public-safety sites are withheld, because the data dictionary states that "NYPD common places, with the exception of precinct locations, cannot be distributed" — 1,641 of 20,466 rows, most of them ordinary places that entered through the Sprint and PCAD dispatch systems. Categories shown are the city's own FACILITY_TYPE codes; the separate FACILITY_DOMAINS column is ignored because it carries 18 values that the published 13-row table does not describe.
The Historic districts reference layer outlines all 159 historic districts and district extensions, from Brooklyn Heights in 1965 to the present. Hovering gives the designation date, borough, acreage and LPC number. The data comes from the companion project The landmarking of New York, which animates the same districts by designation year. This closes a gap noted below: the Landmarks spotlight covers individually designated buildings only, while district designation protects far more buildings than individual designation ever has.
• Construction dates before ~1950 are highly unreliable (see above).
• Demolition records only go back to approximately 2000 (DOB permits) and 1996 (ghost buildings overlay).
• Floor counts are self-reported and may be outdated; the Height color mode uses measured roof heights instead.
• The Landmarks spotlight covers individual designations only; use the Historic districts layer or the Architects & styles spotlight for district-designated buildings.
• Under Construction data covers DOB NOW filings only, not the older BIS system; some active construction sites may be missing.
• Building class codes are assigned by the Department of Finance for tax purposes and may not perfectly reflect a building's current use.
• MapPLUTO is updated quarterly; the data here may lag real-world conditions by several months. Building data (MapPLUTO, footprints, landmarks, vacant-lot classes) last refreshed July 26, 2026.
• The red demolition markers and cyan rebuilt markers come from Buildings Information System permit filings, a system the Department of Buildings retired around 2020 — filings after that date are not captured there. For demolitions through the present, use the Ghost buildings spotlight, whose source updates weekly.
Last updated: July 2026. Data sources: NYC Department of City Planning (MapPLUTO 25v1, City Owned and Leased Properties), NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission, NYC Department of Buildings (DOB NOW: Build), NYC Parks Department. City-owned land categories after the NYU Furman Center.
Initializing map