ABOUT US
Origins
“A love letter to New York City—told block by block.”
CityNeighborhoods.nyc is a love letter to New York City—a long-form portrait told neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, in photographs, maps, and stories.
It didn’t begin as a “project,” exactly. It began as a personal photographic journey: learning to see, learning to walk with intention, and letting the city pull the frame into focus.
In the earliest years, the camera was pointed at whatever caught the eye—sky, trees, light, weather—until Manhattan asserted itself the way it tends to: relentlessly, beautifully, and with too much detail to absorb in a single glance.
Walking with a camera changes the city. You stop moving through it and start reading it—edges, textures, patterns, clues. The sidewalks become a kind of sentence, and you begin to recognize that every block is saying something.
Method
“The photographs became field notes.”
Over time, that private act of wandering sharpened into a method. The focus moved beyond famous icons to the deeper fabric: the distinct personalities of streets, the quiet borders where one place becomes another, the small landmarks that matter intensely to locals and not at all to tourists.
The city started to reveal itself as a mosaic of neighborhoods—interwoven and connected, but stubbornly individual. The walks grew longer. The routes became deliberate. The photographs became field notes. And eventually the work became what you see here: a living archive built from steps, seasons, and repeated return.
Milestones
“Not ‘outer’ anything—essential chapters of the same story.”
That journey has had milestones: the project began in earnest on the streets of Manhattan, later completing a walking-and-photography tour of every Manhattan neighborhood, and ultimately reaching a crescendo with walks and photographs across every neighborhood in all five boroughs in a single calendar year.
Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island aren’t “outer” anything in this framework—they’re essential chapters in the same story, each with their own grammar of streets, shorelines, housing, industry, migration, and memory.
Purpose
“Attention is a form of care.”
CityNeighborhoods is built on a simple belief: attention is a form of care. Documenting a place isn’t the same as owning it, defining it, or freezing it in amber. Neighborhoods change. Names shift. Communities evolve.
The goal here isn’t to declare a single “correct” New York, but to keep a careful record of what it looked like, what it felt like, and what it suggested—at street level, in real light, with the city as both subject and companion.
Exploring the site
“Browse by borough, by neighborhood, or by the journey itself.”
What you’ll find here is a blend of original photography, research-informed mapping, and neighborhood narratives that follow the city’s layers over time: origins and naming, built form and infrastructure, cultural through-lines, and the landmarks (both grand and ordinary) that give a place its gravitational pull.
You can browse by direction, by borough, by neighborhood, or through the ongoing explorations—the diary of routes taken, bridges crossed, and seasons watched, where the project stays alive and unfinished in the best possible way.
Neighborhood entries often combine:
Original photography
Mapped boundaries and geographic context
Historical notes and name origins
Cultural and architectural landmarks
A sense of how each place formed, changed, and endures
You’ll also find thematic collections—ongoing chronicles that follow threads across the entire city (streets, landmarks, and other patterns that don’t stay neatly inside any one neighborhood).
Boundaries
“Guides, not verdicts.”
New York’s neighborhood borders are famously slippery. This project treats boundaries as best-fit, research-informed guides—useful for orientation and comparison, but never as weapons.
If a line on a map doesn’t match your lived experience, that doesn’t make you wrong; it usually means the city is doing what it does best: refusing to be simple.
Values
“More journey than destination.”
CityNeighborhoods is committed to kindness, accuracy, and inclusion. New York is a city of many communities and many truths; the work here aims to respect that, avoid caricature, and stay curious rather than certain.
This website has always been more about the journey than the destination. It will continue to evolve and grow—just as relentlessly as New York grows and evolves. Through it all, this is about the discovery of neighborhoods, and especially the people who make them what they are today.
Contributions
“People build together.”
If you have corrections, historical resources, or stories you’d like to share—especially firsthand context—reach out. The best city archives are the ones people build together.
I’ve already made several changes to the website, as well as neighborhood boundaries and names thanks to reader feedback and insight. I’m looking forward to more conversations to help the site grow!
In the meantime .. Thanks for walking with me!
Contact us
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