Watch New York Being Built

A new animated map shows the major periods of construction in New York since 1880.The map provides a great insight into which areas of New York were developed in each decade of the Twentieth Century. New York Construction allows you to select any year since 1880 and view all the buildings in New York which were built in the 50 years immediately before your chosen date.

There are lots of other examples of building age maps which show the different ages of buildings in cities around the world. We've even seen animated building age maps before. For example, this Amsterdam Growing Over Time map shows how the city of Amsterdam developed and grew from a few houses in the 17th century into the dynamic city it is today. However this animated map only shows when Amsterdam's current buildings were built.

The New York map works a little differently. As the animation plays out the map only ever shows at any one time the buildings constructed in the previous 50 years of the current date on the map. In this way the map shows the major areas of construction in New York over the last 50 years from the date selected. The buildings are color coded on the map by how near to the selected date that they were constructed.

If you want to view the age of all of New York's current buildings on one map then you can check out the NYC's Pluto Data Map. This map color-codes all the buildings by their year of construction. You can therefore use this map to see which neighborhoods have the oldest buildings in New York and which neighborhoods are made up by predominantly new buildings.