How New York City Grew Over Time

A couple of week's ago Maps Mania, in The Street Age Map, featured an interesting map which used vintage historical maps to plot how the Mamoroneck Village in New York grew over the last 150 years. Since then the Running Reality project has reminded me about their platform which maps how towns and cities have changed over time.

In New York City Running Reality shows how the city grew over a period of more than two hundreds years from 1624 to 1859 in almost yearly increments. The animated GIF above shows the growth of New York over the 18th Century. It uses ten maps from Running Reality (one per decade) from 1710-1800. You can explore the whole of New York's historical growth for yourself on the Running Reality interactive map.

As well as New York City Running Reality has mapped the historical development of many other cities around the world. These include Rome, Athens, London, Beijing, and Tokyo. Recently they have also been working more closely on the early development of Washington DC and Alexandria.


If you are interested about New York before the Europeans arrived on America's shores then you can explore the Welikia Project. Before there was Manhattan there was Mannahatta. The Wlikia Project provides an imagined satellite view of Manhatta before New Amsterdam was first established.

The project maps the natural landscape of New York's valleys, forests, fields, freshwater wetlands and salt marshes. If you click on any New York neighborhood on the Welikia Google Map you can discover a wealth of information about the area's ecology as it existed before 1609.