Where are NYC’s Street Plazas?
A Tale of Open Data Spelunking
A recent exchange on twitter drew into question the legal status of a public plaza in lower Manhattan. To answer these questions, I looked towards the available data and came up short. I still don’t have the answer to the original question, but I did find some clarity on a government program that creates and manages some public plazas in New York City: The NYC Plaza Program run by the New York City Department of Transportation.
I lamented the fact that a concise dataset didn’t exist for this program (the closest thing is a PDF of a table), so I set out to create one and share it with the world. Read on for some public realm data munging…
An Oversimplified Description of Parcels and Streets in NYC
Before we start figuring out what a public plaza is from a legal perspective, let’s clarify some terms, starting at the top. If you take the entire landmass of New York City, every part of it is either a “tax lot” or “street”.
Tax lots are polygons of land that can be bought and sold. (They call them tax lots because they are assessed and taxed, accounting for about 30% of the city’s operating revenue) Check out the infamous PLUTO dataset, which includes spatial data and 80+ attribute columns for each of NYC’s ~870,000 tax lots.
All of the land that is not part of a tax lot is part of the street. Streets connect the tax lots, providing a publicly-regulated space most often used for utilites (water, sewer, gas, electricity, and telecommunications) and transportation (pedestrians, bikes, cars, buses, etc). It’s important to think of streets not simply as the places that cars drive, but as the entirety of the space between the private parcels of land.
Tax lots can purchased by the government and converted into streets. Likewise, sections of streets can also be converted into private property and sold to private owners. Check out streets.planning.nyc.gov for an excellent visual depiction of changes to NYC’s streets over the years.
The Plaza Program
The unfortunate status quo is that most of the surface area of our streets is dedicated to motor vehicle traffic and parking, with a pittance set aside for bicycle and pedestrian traffic. On most of our streets, you’re meant to be moving through at all times, you can’t just “be there”. Plazas reinforce the crazy idea that the land between the lots can be used for more than just transportation.
The NYC Plaza Program designates chunks of the street to be used as open space with seating, plants, and other amenities, essentially turning them into little parks. From their website:
DOT works with selected organizations to create neighborhood plazas throughout the City to transform underused streets into vibrant, social public spaces. The NYC Plaza Program is a key part of the City’s effort to ensure that all New Yorkers live within a 10-minute walk of quality open space.
Often these sites are triangles, parking lots, or short streets that can be quickly repurposed. Here’s an example from DUMBO.
Other Programs that Generate Plaza-esque Sites in NYC
This program is just one of many public-space-generating regulations. Some others worth knowing about:
- POPS — Privately Owned Public Spaces — As the name suggests, these are plazas owned and managed by private property owners. The city will grant the ability to build a larger building in exchange for the creation of a plaza.
- Waterfront Zoning for Public Access — Zoning rules that mandate owners of waterfront property to set aside spaces for public access. Many of these become promenade or plaza-esque in their implementation.
- Parks — Many spaces that we’d consider plazas are bona fide parks (they are in a tax lot, not part of the street, and are managed by the Department of Parks and Recreation)
As a human wandering around the city, public space is public space. You shouldn’t need to know what program or agency it’s affiliated with to enjoy it. Once you’re in the realm of planners, community groups, bids, and public realm advocates, these details are extremely important, especially if you want to get involved in the creation of new public spaces.
In the context of the twitter conversation referenced at the beginning of this post, the legal status of a space has implications for jurisdiction of authorities and enforcement of permitted activities. (This has come up a lot with POPS. City Planning sets the requirements but Department of Buildings is tasked with enforcement)
Cursory Land Use Research Using Online Tools and Datasets
Back to the original question: What is the legal status of the plaza between 1 Centre Street and 1 Police Plaza?
First, let’s determine whether it’s part of a tax lot or part of the street. I could download a dataset like PLUTO to answer this question, but DCP has a website called ZoLa with an easy to use interactive map that shows tax lot boundaries.
The faint gray lines show the lot boundaries. The area in question is indeed part of the street and thus regulated by DOT, but is it part of the NYC Plaza Program?
I set out to find a current dataset of Plaza Program sites to start answering this question. The website for the Plaza Program has a prominent link labeled List of Plazas. I wasn’t expecting a dataset here, but figured there would be a website I could scroll through with maps and details about each plaza. Nope, it’s a PDF with a table.
Well, it’s not exactly user-friendly, but it’s a start. The table contains borough and community district, but you have to figure out the on street and cross streets to narrow it down. I couldn’t find anything on the list that resembled the plaza in question, and wished there was a spatial dataset that would show the geographic center or polygon extents for each site.
I headed over to the NYC Open Data Portal and searched for plazas. This turned up a dataset named “Public Plazas”, but it was published by DoITT, not DOT. It contained spatial data, and after zooming in to 1 Centre Street I saw what looks like a clear boundary of the plaza! Now we’re getting somewhere.
The plaza has a vector geometry in this mysterious “Public Plazas” dataset. I downloaded it to poke around a bit more, and learned that it has 1360 rows versus the 70 or so on the DOT’s PDF list of Plaza Program Sites. What are the sites in this dataset? Where did they come from? Why isn’t this DOT’s dataset?
It turns out the public plazas dataset is part of the broader “Planimetrics” dataset published by DoITT. Planimetrics is the mapping of spatial data from aerial features. Basically, the city paid a vendor to scour aerial photos of the city and digitize things for mapping. This is extremely useful for identifying things like water towers, subway entrances, building footprints, and more, but for my use case it means “public plaza” is a pretty arbitrary designation. More or less, this dataset represents what appear to be public plazas by whomever was doing the digitizing. We’ll have to look further.
This is where my quest to determine the status of the plaza behind 1 Centre street ends… I know it’s part of the street, and not part of the Plazas program, but that’s as far as I got. If you know more, please comment below.
Let’s make a Dataset!
My search came up short, but there was a clear need for anyone doing research in this space: The world needs a machine-readable dataset of NYC Plaza Program Sites, including spatial features so that they can be mapped, and including details about the partner orgs, extents, etc. I spent a few hours researching existing sources of information about the Plazas Program, and consolidated what I could into a new dataset, which I’ve shared below.
Data source 1: DOT’s PDF of Plaza Program Sites
It’s got 73 rows, but we have no idea when it was updated or how complete it is, but it’s safe to assume this is the best list of these sites that is publicly available.
Data source 2: CECM’s Plazas Website
The plot thickens: The NYC Mayor’s Office of Citywide Event Coordination and Management has a website that allows you to reserve a Plaza for an event. They even have PDF site maps showing the extent of each plaza!
But words matter… are these the same “plazas” as DOT”s “NYC Public Plaza Program”? A quick spot check of a few sites confirms that the the names, partner entities, and locations match!
The CECM site’s data adds a few nuggets of information that the DOT pdf doesn’t have:
- A link to a PDF showing the extent of the plaza. This is critical context for understanding the sites.
- An estimated square footage for the site. Now we’ve got some real numerical data we can do analysis on.
- A “level” (A-D) based on size which determines the price to get an event permit.
I augmented the original DOT list with square footage, level, and PDF links by manually copying and pasting from the CECM website. I later discovered that it’s all in a structured-ish javascript file that the site consumes.
So far we have two pretty complete sources, but there’s some mismatch between these first two sources. The CECM site contains data for 63 plazas, and DOT’s contains 73. More specifically, the CECM data contains 5 plazas that are not in DOT’s data, and DOT’s data contains 15 plazas that aren’t on CECM’s data.
Data source 3: Manual Research on Partner Entities
I manually searched to find a URL for more information about the partner entities. Most are BIDs or community institutions that are easily found, but a few are cryptic LLCs or “friends of” orgs without much of a digital footprint. I added a column called partner_url to house these links.
Data source 4: Manual Lookup of Point Geometries for each Site
The final value add for this project was to add a point geometry to each row of plaza data, making the dataset spatial so it can be mapped. To accomplish this, I searched for each site on Google Maps, cross referencing each site with its CECM site map and the listed cross streets, copying the latitude and longitude coordinates. I added longitude and latitude columns to my dataset to store the point geometries.
I later on discovered that many of these plaza sites are included in the Department of City Planning’s Facilities Database, a conglomerate dataset that seeks to map all city sites and services. I could have cross-referenced this dataset for point geometries, but had already completed my manual geocoding. (There are only 72 plazas in the Facilities Database and we still don’t know if it’s any more current than the PDF list on DOT’s website or the CECM data)
Putting it all together…
Now for the Qri bits. 🤓 First, here’s my new dataset at the time of writing:
As you can imagine, manually compiling and cleaning my new NYC Plazas Program dataset required several iterations. There were small fixes to correct typos and large changes where entire new columns of data were added. I used Qri to manage these changes along the way, so each step became an immutable version I could reference in the future. Here’s what the history of the dataset looks like at the time of writing:
Each version in the history list has a commit message describing the changes I made before saving that version. Each version is fully inspectable, and a CSV can be exported at any point in the history I choose.
I also added a readme, which now lives with the dataset and all future versions. Between this blog post and the qri dataset’s readme, anyone who uses this dataset in the future should have plenty of background info to know that they are only looking at plazas that are regulated under this specific program.
The latest version is now published on Qri Cloud, so you can clone it and get access to my full commit history, metadata, and readme.
👩💻 Download Qri Desktop to clone the NYC Plaza Program Sites dataset👨💻
The Qri dataset gives you the full featured dataset with the history and readme, but if you just want a file, I’ve also published it to github. I can’t vouch for it staying up to date here, so I encourage you to follow the Qri dataset to stay current!
Now It’s Spatial!
The addition of point geometries (latitude and longitude coordinates) means we can make simple maps of the data. This is hardly an analysis, but here’s a simple point map showing the overall distribution of the 78 sites around the city, along with a chart showing the count by borough:
I’m also working on a simple interactive web map so you can see details about each site alongside the PDF map of its extent. Check back soon!
Data Flows…
After all of this work, it’s worth noting that this dataset already exists. It’s an internal dataset that lives somewhere on a government computer. All of the public sources I’ve cited are derived from it, but each comes at a cost of losing some value from the original (and some add more data than the original had).
This is a theoretical diagram showing three different flows of information that theoretically lead back to a canonical source somewhere in DOT. All three sources have different row counts, and there’s no public source we can reliably point to to say “this is the actual, official list of plazas”. My dataset is a best effort, but will always be limited because there’s no publicly-available, canonical source of truth.
Wishlist Columns
If we can crowdsource or FOIL for more info (or if DOT publishes it), here are some helpful columns I’d love to see in this dataset:
year_opened- the year the plaza openedannual_operating_cost- this will be hard to pin down, but it would be good to know for analysis of the programpolygon- vector geometry of the extent of the plaza
If you’ve got ideas for additional columns, comment below, or clone the dataset and start adding them on your own!
More Info About the NYC Plazas Program
- A 2013 New York Times Article about the program
- Curbed did some reporting on the program in 2015, and mapped every site (interestingly, there were only 25 sites five years ago!)
- GEHL was consulted to do analysis work in support of the program, and has some information about their process and the background of the program here
- DOT tweets about plazas using the hashtag #plazasXnyc
- Smart Growth Voice did a Geospatial Analysis of the Plaza Program in 2016
Update February 14, 2020
DOT has published a spatial dataset with polygons for each plaza site! The data are published here: https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Transportation/Public-Plazas/k5k6-6jex
The official dataset has 79 rows (compare to the 78 in my compiled dataset above. I was pretty close!)
