New York's 1.67 Million Buildings Colored by Age

The craze for ;building age maps seems to have faded in recent years, which is a shame because I think they can reveal a surprising amount about how a city has grown and changed over time. When you map the age of every building, patterns of development, expansion and redevelopment can suddenly become much easier to see in a way that is hard to grasp from standard historical records.

New York in 1.67 Million Buildings is bucking the trend and is also a particularly impressive example of a building age map. The map colours New York's buildings according to the decade in which they were constructed, creating an extraordinary colorful patchwork of the city's architectural history. Zoom in and you can explore individual buildings; zoom out and whole neighbourhoods emerge as distinct bands of development.

The map also includes a timeline which allows you to watch New York grow over time. Pan through the years and buildings appear as they were constructed, providing a fascinating visual record of the city's expansion. You can also switch from building age to height to see the city transformed into a kind of 3D relief map, with Manhattan's skyscrapers rising above the surrounding buildings.

There is an important caveat to the historical animation, however. The map is primarily showing buildings that survive today. An existing building that was constructed in, say, 1900 will appear in the animation, but a building constructed in 1900 and demolished in 1950 will generally not. The map does include a separate historical layer containing more than 26,000 documented former buildings, but this is only a partial reconstruction of New York's lost buildings.

This means the animation shouldn't be interpreted as a complete history of construction in New York. A neighbourhood which appears to have developed slowly may in reality have seen several generations of buildings come and go. What the map does particularly well is show the age of New York's surviving building stock and reveal the remarkable patterns of development that remain visible in the city today.