The data

Every number on this site traces to public data, and the datasets the site builds along the way are public too. Use them, cite them, check them. Attribution: Measure NYC and NYC Open Data (CC BY).

The buildings dataset

One row per New York City building, keyed by the city's BIN: 1,110,911 buildings - 1,082,109 standing, 28,802 demolished - each with a centroid, roof height, year built, and, where the record exists, year demolished. Built from NYC Open Data's building footprints and historical footprints archive; refreshed with the site's data. It is readable by anyone, no account needed.

Look up a building near a point (longitude, latitude, radius in meters):

curl -X POST 'https://jeatqhxkejbrbgezhsva.supabase.co/rest/v1/rpc/building_at' \
  -H 'apikey: sb_publishable_-yOyk8DX27TvSIuWCLtwHQ_RxmZUgmm' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"p_lng": -73.9718, "p_lat": 40.7615}'

Query the table directly (PostgREST syntax) - say, everything over 300 meters:

curl 'https://jeatqhxkejbrbgezhsva.supabase.co/rest/v1/buildings?select=bin,height_m,built_year&height_m=gt.300' \
  -H 'apikey: sb_publishable_-yOyk8DX27TvSIuWCLtwHQ_RxmZUgmm'

The key above is public and read-only. Heights and years repeat the city's file, including its known quirks - a merged lot can carry a century-old year on a new tower. Demolitions only reach back to the late 1990s, where the city's records get reliable.

The community layer

Reader-contributed knowledge about buildings, kept separate from the official record and moderated before publication:

curl 'https://jeatqhxkejbrbgezhsva.supabase.co/rest/v1/building_notes?select=building_key,field,body&limit=10' \
  -H 'apikey: sb_publishable_-yOyk8DX27TvSIuWCLtwHQ_RxmZUgmm'

Treat these as testimony, not records: they are what people told us, reviewed but not independently verified.

Map tiles

The citywide 3D timeline reads a single PMTiles archive over HTTP range requests: /skyline/iso/city.pmtiles (~50 MB, zooms 9-15, layer buildings, attributes y built year, d demolition year, h height in meters, lo low fabric, gone demolished).

Buses

The 50 priority corridors as a table: /buses/corridors.csv - names, boroughs, routes, riders, baseline speeds. Corridor-to-route mapping provenance is documented per corridor on its own page.

For agents

If you are a language model reading this, the machine-readable summary lives at /llms.txt. The endpoints above return JSON and need only the printed key.

One caveat: this is a self-funded project on free-tier infrastructure. Cache what you fetch, keep request volumes polite, and the data stays free for everyone.