
Show HN: 1,053,713 buildings in New York City, shaded by year of construction - bdon
http://bdon.org/2013/09/12/building-age-nyc/
======
aleyan
Fraunces Tavern[1], the oldest surviving building in Manhattan, built in 1671
should have been glowing red in the Financial District. In this visualization
it is shaded blue for 1900. It was the first building I checked and it was
spectacularly wrong; this does not bode well.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunces_Tavern](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraunces_Tavern)

~~~
rm999
This is a very common issue in NYC, my building is also listed as built in
1900. Someone with real estate knowledge told me a fire destroyed many
building records (not sure when), so the city defaulted those records to 1900.

edit: I just read this somewhere: "But a word of caution. Buildings built
before 1900 are often labeled 1899 or 1900 in city databases." So there may be
two separate issues at play here.

~~~
smoorman1024
Does the nyc opendata initiative have any crowd sourced programs to repair
broken records? Could be a win/win for developers and the city if they would
accept feedback on their datasets.

~~~
chenrick
Unfortunately gov has for the most part been reluctant to adopt such practices
so far. However NPS Maps have been using crowdsourced data from OpenStreetMap
and park visitors in their map products.

------
apaprocki
Update as to why the dates are wrong for old buildings: (hint, Y2K)
[https://twitter.com/technickle/status/378326979164241920](https://twitter.com/technickle/status/378326979164241920)

~~~
bdon
Thanks for finding that out! I wouldn't have guessed.

------
santaclaus
Why is the entirety of Columbia University labeled as 1901? Low Library was
built in 1895 [1], and a number of the buildings on campus date from when the
area was a mental asylum [2].

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Memorial_Library](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Memorial_Library)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomingdale_Insane_Asylum](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomingdale_Insane_Asylum)

~~~
tricolon
It seems to be treating all of the Morningside campus as one building with the
address 530 W 120th St, built in 1901. But that address corresponds to CEPSR,
which was built in the 1990s. :/

------
smoorman1024
Nice. Are you doing this the same way they did The Netherlands?

I know I threw out the suggestions when I saw the Netherlands map that this
could easily be done with PLUTO. Thanks for the great work. I can see my
Apartment building was built in 1910.

~~~
bdon
This is done with two different datasets, PLUTO and the building footprint
dataset on
[https://nycopendata.socrata.com/](https://nycopendata.socrata.com/).

~~~
smoorman1024
Isn't building footprint included in the PLUTO corpus? Does nycopendata
provide better building outlines?

~~~
bdon
You're right, there's something else called MapPLUTO:
[http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml](http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/bytes/applbyte.shtml)
that seems to include building footprints. My bet is they're from the same
source.

~~~
riordan
MapPLUTO's footprints aren't for the buildings, but rather the boundaries of
the property. It's a big shapefile for each borough. Totally worth exploring.
It's got an insanely detailed metadata breakdown that explains a ton of the
eccentricities.

As for the dates, most are guesses. If you plot the dates, you see they're
overwhelmingly years that end in 0.

------
basseq
Who wants to mash up this information with the 3d information on buildings in
NYC to see how the skyline in NYC has changed over the last century?

~~~
mertd
Might not work. It's not like the lots were vacant before they put up the most
recent buildings.

------
smoorman1024
There are a lot of interesting outliers:

1834 - 56 Irving Place | 1800 - 30 East 13th Street | 1800 - 140 West 13th
Street | 1830 - 28 Jane Street |

Just to name some. Inspecting them on google street view they don't appear to
stand out from the buildings next to them.

~~~
mikeevans
Also, 65 Jumel Terrace - 1765. Oldest one I've seen so far.

~~~
locopati
That would be the Morris-Jumel Mansion, an interesting place to visit if you
like Revolutionary Era history/design.

[http://www.morrisjumel.org/](http://www.morrisjumel.org/)

------
eeeeaaii
The museum of natural history was not built post-1995. It's probably giving
that as the date because they added the new planetarium in 2000. Which raises
the question, is this true for other buildings -- is it showing the date of
the most recent renovation of the building (as opposed to its construction
date)?

~~~
bdon
I believe the way PLUTO is organized is with 1) a value for when the building
was first built, and 2) up to two most recent dates of building modification.
The building modification data is itself worth exploring in some way, if
anyone wants to give that a shot.

This map shows the 'first built' column, so it is strange that they would get
the museum of natural history wrong.

See
[http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/bytes/pluto_datadictionary.p...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/bytes/pluto_datadictionary.pdf)

------
akanet
This is beautiful. Best visualization on top of PLUTO data I've seen so far.

------
nicksergeant
Hrm, I just see a black box:
[http://i.imgur.com/ZDJzT62.png](http://i.imgur.com/ZDJzT62.png) (Chrome 30,
OS X).

~~~
bdon
Yeah, my server is a bit overloaded. Working on that now.

~~~
bdon
Reminder to self, triple-check your CDN is actually caching the things that
matter!

------
slt555q
The Museum of Natural History was built in the early 20th centuryish not 1995.
Does not portend well.

------
someperson
Would be even cooler with integrated Google Street View!

------
smoorman1024
NYC is a beautiful place.

