New York in 3D

You can explore New York in glorious 3D on Cesium. In New York City Cesium uses NYC DoITT's 3D Building Massing Model of New York City to help to bring the city alive.

NYC DoITT's 3D building model was created from a 2014 aerial survey of the city. The building models include detailed pitched roofs and roof appendages such as chimneys, parapets and spindles. If you want to use the 3D buildings in your own maps you can download the building massing model in the CityGML format from the NYC.gov website.


NYC DoITT's 3D Building Massing Model was also used in the New York Times' Mapping the Shadows of New York City. This beautiful map shows the extent that the city's tall buildings block the sun throughout the year.

The Times says that most Manhattan neighborhoods remain in shadow for at least half of the day. They also claim that the amount of time a location spends in shadow during daylight hours can affect everything from apartment rental prices to the flow of foot traffic on the city's streets.

To calculate the extent of building shadows in winter, summer, spring and fall the NYT worked with the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University to calculate the total number of minutes that a given point spends in shadow over the course of a day, based on the height and location of nearby buildings.