Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. How do you define your neighborhood? Do you use landmarks to create strongly defined borders? Is a neighborhood defined by the community that currently lives there once did? Maybe you think neighborhood boundaries are construction resulting from the real estate and development industries, or perhaps you just base it off of vibes. Well, here in New York City, it seems like neighborhoods are constantly in flux and the boundaries between neighborhoods are sometimes up for debate.

There's the well-established ones where you know that if you're on 90th Street West of Central Park, you're definitely on the Upper West Side, but what about Carnegie Hill? Have you ever heard of Carnegie Hill? Unless you live in a certain part of the Upper East Side, you probably haven't. If you're apartment hunting on StreetEasy or a similar site, Carnegie Hill is definitely a neighborhood that exists, but when have you ever heard a New Yorker say, "Hey, I'm from Carnegie Hill"? How many times have you questioned what neighborhood you actually live in?

Well, today we're hoping we can assuage some of your confusion and also understand how neighborhoods come to be. Have you seen that amazing thing in The New York Times that came out the other day called An Extremely Detailed Map of New York city Neighborhoods, and along with it an extremely detailed guide to this extremely detailed map. Well, joining us now to go over the map and help us figure out how neighborhoods come into existence here in the city and to take your calls is Larry Buchanan, graphics editor and reporter at The Times. Larry, thanks for joining. Welcome to WNYC.

Larry Buchanan: Brian, thank you so much for having me. This is my actual dream.

Brian Lehrer: Apparently, we have over 350 distinct neighborhoods here in New York City. I think there are like 350 shades of different colors on the map.

Larry Buchanan: Yes, absolutely.

Brian Lehrer: Really?

Larry Buchanan: Yes, we actually have more than, I think at this point 370 possibly, maybe even pushing close to 380, and we have tens of thousands of submissions from New Yorkers on this map, more than 40,000 now, that make up all of those colored blocks. It's definitely a map of deep uncertainty of what people call various blocks and how people love to fight over this stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get into some of the particulars, this is a crowdsource project that for you as a graphics editor and reporter used a lot of New York Times readers to compile, so how did that go?

Larry Buchanan: This is a dream project for a graphics editor and for a reporter. I made the map with a couple of people, Rumsey Taylor, Josh Katz and Eve Washington at The Times. We initially wanted to do this crowdsourcing project after the city council tried to define what Times Square was when they wanted to ban guns in Times Square. They drew this big box around Times Square that I don't think most people would count as Times Square. The borders were quite large but we were a little slow and we couldn't get our act together.

The news passed us, but we had this interface where you could draw on this map and save these points and dots. We thought we would expand this out to the whole city and we were always jealous of this DNAinfo project that did a version of this in 2015. We made this map you could draw on, tell us where you live, what you call this place and we got this overwhelming response, more than 40,000 people at this point have drawn their neighborhoods, and we use that to make up all of the names and labels you see on the map.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can continue the crowdsourcing project a little bit here. 212-433-WNYC. Here's the ask. When you call in, we always ask you where you're calling from, how do you figure that out? Who, who's in New York City right now, thinks that you're in a place that may have been called one neighborhood sometime in the past, but it's called something else today? Do you ever feel like you're in a fuzzy area? We can actually see fuzziness visually on this map and we'll get into that in a minute. Do you live in a borderline area that might be called one neighborhood, might be called another neighborhood, or have you ever?

Talk about your neighborhoods and where those lines are or may someday be 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 for Larry Buchanan from The Times. I'll point out that the map prominently features two different kinds of borders, sharply defined ones and somewhat fuzzy ones. What were you getting at visually?

Larry Buchanan: The map itself is meant to initially describe what you just said, that there are these areas that we all know when we're standing in a particular place, we're in this neighborhood, and nobody is arguing about this. These are places like the middle of the Upper West Side, or the middle of Astoria, or in the financial district or something like that. Then there are vast parts of the city that when we look at where, say, 9 out of 10 people who live there, 8 out of 10 people who live there, agree or disagree on what to call that. Vast parts of the city just fade away and you're left with these cores of neighborhoods, and then these real fuzzy border zones all over the place.

In particular, areas that don't have geographic features to hem them in. No one's fighting about the borders of Woodlawn in the Bronx that's hemmed in by Yonkers and a highway and the cemetery and a park, but people are fighting about the borders of so many other areas, like the border between Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, for example, it's constantly moving. Many people think Prospect Heights is pushing further and further east into Crown Heights or the border between [unintelligible 00:06:14] Bed-Stuy, or the border between the Upper East Side and East Harlem.

All of those kinds of things you can see in the map, and they're just very, very fuzzy and we wanted to visually make that apparent when you go to the map. These muddier colors signify that deep disagreement among what to call it. Midtown Manhattan is just totally Brown, it's just like a soup. Nobody knows what to call any of these kinds of areas. That allows something for like Hudson Yards to pop up and be built into existence and now it's a neighborhood name that's on the map.

Brian Lehrer: Or Hudson Square, where WNYC is [crosstalk]

Larry Buchanan: Hudson square, for sure, or [crosstalk] West SoHo, or whatever you want to call it.

Brian Lehrer: I used to think of it as SoHo, and then when we moved in, I don't know, maybe the real estate industry gave it that name Hudson Square. You want to take one of these that you mentioned, maybe one of those from Brooklyn, and describe how the borders have seemed to become fuzzy? Is it based on who lives there and what they want to call it, or the real estate brokers want to call it? Give us one example and how it's happened over time?

Larry Buchanan: I think the best example is probably one that we talked about in the piece, which is between Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Everybody who lives in New York City has probably been at a party and been asked where you live and maybe you live in one of these board areas, and you say, "Well, I call it Crown Heights, but I think technically, it would be Prospect Heights." In actuality, there is no technically, there is no official source of neighborhood borders and so that's what allows this to happen. The border areas you see on Google are a good guess by Google, but they're not official by any standard.

The borders you see on StreetEasy when you go to search for an apartment in Prospect Heights are not official by any means, but they give this sense of them being official. Over time, in something like Prospect Heights where many people would draw the border squared off with Prospect Park up Washington Avenue, people in our survey, you can see are increasingly drawing that border East, one block, two blocks, three blocks, four blocks into what would have traditionally been called Crown Heights. You have this fuzzy area in between and we talked about two instances in the piece that you can just see this on the ground.

One is, there's an apartment for sale on Sterling Place in this fuzzy zone right now, that one real estate website calls Prospect Heights and one real estate website calls Crown Heights. Then in this fuzzy zone, there's a key food that used to be called the Gala Fresh farms that's now a key food and they've added Prospect Heights to the name in an area that would have traditionally been called Crown Heights. You've got these four or five block area where it's very, very fuzzy and people don't really know what to call it.

Brian Lehrer: John in the Bronx has an example. John, you're on WNYC. Hi there.

John: Hey, Brian, good to talk to you. I live in the Bronx. I live about two blocks east of White Plains Road, two blocks south of Pelham Parkway. Some people call it Morris Park. The library name is Van Nest, little bit north of Little Yemen. There's [unintelligible 00:09:42] road right there and nobody knows what to call it.

Brian Lehrer: Are you familiar with that area, Larry?

Larry Buchanan: If it's close to this area we talk about in the piece, they would be close to Little Yemen, which I think John mentioned. That area is definitely one that's been in flux a lot and on our map, all of those names you mention are apparent there. Little Yemen is an interesting case study that we also talk about in the piece. Basically, an air traffic controller from Queens, this guy Yahya Obeid saw a bunch of-- he's a Yemeni American and a bunch of Yemeni businesses had been moving in there and he took it upon himself to go to Google and add a missing place to Google Maps. He tried and tried and tried and tried, and eventually the name Little Yemen got added to the map. Now it's this neighborhood that's been breathed into existence in what was maybe once called Morris Park or Van Nest or I live near the Bronx Zoo.

Brian Lehrer: John, good luck in whatever neighborhood you live. Joy at 108th and Broadway in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hi, Joy.

Joy: Hi. Yes, I live at 108th and Broadway and I don't know what neighborhood I'm in. I tell people the Upper West Side because they think they have some sense of what that means, but I think it might be called Bloomingdale, it might be called Manhattan Valley. Nobody's ever heard of either of those, except for the Bloomingdale Historical Society, which is a great group.

I'm not Morningside Heights, that's above 110th, that's Columbia. I'm like, "I don't know where I live." I tell people I live above Absolute Bagel, and then they're like, "Oh, Absolute Bagel, we know where you live." I'm like, "Yes, you're on [unintelligible 00:11:26] Bagel." I don't know where I live. What do you call it? The person who's the guest? [unintelligible 00:11:33]

Larry Buchanan: I'm looking at your block right now and the names you mentioned are [unintelligible 00:11:37] 56% of people would say you live on the Upper West Side. 20% would say Manhattan Valley, 19% would say Morningside Heights, and disagree with your hard border at 110th, and 3% would say Bloomingdale.

Brian Lehrer: Nobody says SoHa, South of Harlem?

Larry Buchanan: Nobody says SoHa. I don't think SoHa made the map.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, it didn't make the map.

Larry Buchanan: South Harlem made the map but not the aggregated name SoHa, which brings up a whole bunch of philosophical things about how we count these neighborhoods and how we decide what to add and what not to add.

Brian Lehrer: That's interesting right there, so that's maybe Upper West Side or Bloomingdale or whatever, but if you just walk a block or two towards Central Park from 108th and Broadway, that's Manhattan Valley for sure.

Larry Buchanan: For sure, nothing is for sure on this map, Brian-

[laughter]

Larry Buchanan: -very little is for sure. On our map, yes, a little bit of Manhattan Valley, but it's still most people on our percentages would say Upper West Side.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Highways are interesting in that they create sharply defined boundaries in some places, but fuzzier more questionable borders in others. You write a bit in the article about the BQE and how it shaped neighborhoods in both Brooklyn and Queens. What are some neighborhoods that have been either harshly defined or made somewhat hazy by the presence of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway?

Larry Buchanan: The BQE cutting through Brooklyn and Queens gives a sharp border to Greenpoint and then gives this leftover area where, the BQE, I described it in the piece as crust on a kid's sandwich. These leftover edges form the edges of Wallabout, Vinegar Hill, Dumbo, what is now known as the Columbia Street Waterfront District, which is a little bit of a mouthful. The edges of Red Hook and the edges of Bay Ridge.

It cuts Williamsburg in two, and so in Williamsburg, you have this thing happening, that's been happening for a long time, where you've got the traditional Williamsburg that people draw as this big area that cuts across the BQE. Because the BQE slices it in two, you've got this other area on the other side on the east side of the BQE called East Williamsburg. People love to fight about, this is the canonical example of did real estate agents make up this name or is it an actual historical name that East Williamsburg was a thing?

Are we just describing the East of Williamsburg or is East Williamsburg a separate and completely different place where when you cross a border, you feel you're in a different zone, or is it just a way to extend Williamsburg so we could charge more money for rent because people didn't want to live in Bushwick or whatever. These fights are interesting. In the case of the BQE, it allows, it gives a hard border to this other neighborhood called East Williamsburg, if you want to believe that that is a real thing, which many 100s of people on our map do believe it's a real thing, and many other 100s of people told us it is absolutely not a real thing. It doesn't exist.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, our guest is Larry Buchanan, graphics editor and reporter at The New York Times, associated with that really amazing thing you may have seen on the website. Is there a print edition? It's so colorful so it definitely works on the website. Did you do a print newspaper edition as well?

Larry Buchanan: Not yet. It'll be out in print hopefully soon.

Brian Lehrer: Okay. This thing called an extremely detailed map of New York City neighborhoods and along with it an extremely detailed guide to this extremely detailed map as we're talking about how fuzzy some of the neighborhood distinctions are in New York City. Let's take another caller on one of these. Gail in Ditmas Park, you're on WNYC. Hi, Gail.

Gail: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Well, as I said, I lived in Ditmas Park, which I think didn't really exist I don't know 20, 30, 40 years ago. When I moved to this neighborhood 20 years ago, I told my mother who had grown up in Brooklyn in the '30s and the '40s that I was moving to Ditmas Park, and she said, "I've never heard of that. What is that? Where are you moving?" Then when I took her out to see our house and our block, she said, "Oh, this is Flatbush. My good friend lived across the street." She knew this neighborhood very well but it was then called Flatbush, and Ditmas Park I guess is a real estate industry construct. For a while they called it Victorian Flatbush, and then they came up with Ditmas Park. I think they separated from the more West Indian neighborhoods to our East.

Brian Lehrer: I'm not sure I'm seeing Ditmas Park as such on this map. I'm looking at the Brooklyn section. Is it there?

Larry Buchanan: Yes, it's there. We've got Ditmas Park but people also call it Flatbush, also call it Prospect Park South, and depending on your border and how close you are to Coney Island Avenue Kensington

Brian Lehrer: Do you know where it came from?

Larry Buchanan: I don't know. I have no idea where Ditmas Park came from, but I do know that Flatbush, that area was all referred to as Flatbush, as Flatbush was one of the original six towns of Brooklyn, and took up vast swaths of that. In the piece, we show the difference between, say, what Google defines as Flatbush and what New York Times readers in our survey defined as Flatbush. They're vastly different areas. Some of it bleeds over into what we label now as Ditmas Park, which is this bright green on the map and bleeds into this blue that we have for Flatbush. There's little agreement among people in your neighborhood.

Brian Lehrer: I see why I didn't see Ditmas Park there originally. I just wasn't zoomed in enough on the map, because when you first look at it, and folks, you can use this as a little tip for when you open this on The New York Times website. You're not going to see all 350 plus neighborhoods that Larry and company identified that exist. You're going to see a smaller number, but if you use-- how you zoom in on-- well it depends on if you're using a mouse, or a tablet, whatever, but if you zoom in, then you'll see some of the finer distinctions including Ditmas Park show up. Here's Jesse who grew up in Maspeth but maybe it isn't Maspeth anymore where that was. Jesse, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jesse: Hi. Yes, I grew up in Maspeth and apparently, according to the map now, the border is Flushing Avenue and anything south of that is Ridgewood. Queens has the thing where you can put a town instead of just Queens on your address, your mailing address. I always wrote Maspeth, New York as my town, and apparently now the blocks south of me where I grew up are Ridgewood, according to the map. The elementary school I went to was renamed the Maspeth Elementary School a couple of years ago after I stopped going and according to the map, that's firmly in Ridgewood now.

Larry Buchanan: Maybe they'll have to rename the school again.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about places that have very different, let's say, political or cultural vibes, Maspeth and Ridgewood, so different, right?

Jesse: Yes. When I grew up there, Maspeth was very, very polish. I was one of the lone Asian kids in the neighborhood, and Ridgewood has a lot more progressive, I guess, vibe to it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, right. It's like Williamsburg in a way these days. In the good sense, not in the real estate development sense of that, although maybe that too, but in that cultural sense. Anything more on Maspeth and Ridgewood, Larry?

Larry Buchanan: The area between there is very blurry, and so it looks to me a little bit like Ridgewood is expanding and Maspeth is contracting a tiny bit. If you go down a little bit farther, the border between Ridgewood and Bushwick is interesting because that's an actual border. Ridgewood is in Queens and Bushwick is in Brooklyn, but that doesn't seem to stop people from still counting parts of Ridgewood in Brooklyn and parts of Bushwick in Queens.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, I mentioned Carnegie Hill in the intro, which is, I guess, supposed to be the narrow section of Fifth Avenue along Central Park East up to 110th Street, but at a certain point, that's just East Harlem, right?

Larry Buchanan: Yes, and on StreetEasy, it's called upper Carnegie Hill and then Carnegie Hill proper would be just south of that. On StreetEasy, you can search for the entire Upper East Side, and the entire Upper East Side includes this small sliver that's half a block wide that goes all the way up to 110th Street. I talked to the Community Manager in East Harlem and he was very firm that that is East Harlem, not Upper Carnegie Hill.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get one more caller in here. Emma in Bushwick, you're on WNYC. Are you sure you're in Bushwick, Emma? Hi.

Emma: Hi, Brian. I'm pretty sure I am in Bushwick, actually, but I wanted to talk about where you and I work, which we always call, I work in New York Public Radio, and we always call it SoHo. I've heard a bit of animosity towards terms like Hudson Square, but let's be real, SoHo is a neighborhood that's got cobblestone streets, all these high-end boutiques, short buildings, narrow streets. Where we work at 160 Varick, it doesn't feel like that, it's got these really tall buildings, it's got all this traffic from the Holland Tunnel. I don't know about a name like Hudson Square, I think of it as the Holland Tunnel Hill Zone.

[laughter]

Emma: I don't know. I think there's a lot of this real estate development stuff going on, but a lot of the time, there are these no man's land, undefined zones that really feel distinct in a lot of ways, and yes, I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: I'm always zoomed in now and I don't see Holland Tunnel Hill Zone, but Larry, yes, maybe I just too casually thought, "Well, we're right there below Houston Street, so it's SoHo, south of Houston." What are you thinking?

Larry Buchanan: I think there's a good case to be made for any of the names. Hudson Square is only 42% of the people in this neighborhood actually call that Hudson Square, so SoHo is still a strong 35, the West Village, West SoHo, and even Tribeca, which is also defined as below canal, but 4% of people are still calling this Tribeca.

Brian Lehrer: Emma, thanks. Keep up the good work. Last thought, what do we really learn from this whole exercise? It's really fun as obviously most people listening to this and participate in this are having fun with identifying their neighborhoods, and we can throw some darts at the real estate industry for trying to name things just for the sake of property values. What else do we learn ultimately that's a takeaway from this?

Larry Buchanan: In the thousands of reader comments we got, there's this deep sense of belonging to a place that you call a thing where you live. This has triggered so many memories for so many people and we've gotten tons and tons and tons of comments of just people, it used to be this, my grandmother and I remember that we used to live here, and it was called this, and I was so attached to this version of this place.

This map allows people, there's a comments view here that you can see people reflecting and thinking about what these places mean to them. I probably should also mention that millions of New Yorkers don't speak English. There's a whole different version of this map for people who speak one of the more than 670 languages, other languages that people in New York speak. This is a way to start to capture some of those memories and those ideas and ways for people to stake out some space for themselves in [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Last thing. We have the president of New York Road Runners coming up next in advance of the marathon on Sunday. Do you have a number for how many of your 350 plus neighborhoods the marathon goes through at the most granular level?

Larry Buchanan: I don't, but I can get it because I'm also running the marathon on Sunday.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, really, wow. Well, congratulations in advance. That is awesome. He puts together the most detailed map of New York City neighborhoods probably in the history of New York City neighborhoods while training for the marathon, Larry Buchanan, graphics editor and reporter for The New York Times. Thank you.

Larry Buchanan: Thanks, Brian.

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