The New York Times published a highly specific map of NYC and its various neighborhoods, which are notoriously in flux. It was developed, in part, by community feedback. It’s honestly pretty difficult to find an address where every person you know would agree on the exact name of the neighborhood in question. For example, I’ve been working at Adafruit for almost 11 years. I’ve always considered it to be located in “West SoHo”. But when I look at Ada HQ on the map, it tells me only 5% of people would agree with me.
It’s a New York pastime to gripe that neighborhoods are invented and defined by real estate brokers, developers and other city gatekeepers. But the more interesting truth may be that they are also reinvented and reinforced, refracted through race and class, by us: by the air traffic controller who lives in Little Yemen, by the Manhattan community manager who’s sure his constituents live in East Harlem — and not “Upper Carnegie Hill” — and by the Brooklyn residents who decided to name a relatively flat piece of land Boerum Hill.
A name has power. It can foreshadow who will be moving in. By itself, it can conjure so much: gentrification, displacement, inequality, status. When we argue over names, or even invent new ones, we may be trying to exert some of that power — or lamenting that others have more power than we do.
We asked New Yorkers themselves to map their neighborhoods and to tell us what they call them. The result, while imperfect, is probably the most detailed map of the city’s neighborhoods ever compiled:
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