Sixty years of preservation
All 159 historic districts and extensions the Landmarks Preservation Commission has declared since 1965 — some 4,570 acres, from Brooklyn Heights onward. Press play to watch the map fill in.
An animated map of all 159 of the city's historic districts and extensions, and when each was declared.
Each shape is a New York City historic district — an area the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) has designated so that changes to its buildings are regulated. Districts light up on the map in the order they were declared, colored by the decade of designation. Hover a district for its name, year and size; click it to pin the panel and open its LPC designation report and Wikipedia page. This map covers only designated, currently active historic districts — not individual landmarks, scenic landmarks, interior landmarks, or areas that were merely proposed.
This map draws all 159 historic districts and extensions the commission has designated and keeps active — matching the LPC's own published count — declared between Nov. 23, 1965 (Brooklyn Heights, the first, about seven months after the Landmarks Law of April 1965) and Nov. 25, 2025. By borough: Manhattan 82, Brooklyn 47, Queens 14, The Bronx 13, Staten Island 3.
25 of the 159 are extensions of an earlier district, each carrying its own, later designation date and drawn as its own shape — so a district and its extensions light up in different years. (An earlier version of this map used NYC Open Data's consolidated export, which shows only 141 shapes because it omits about 18 extensions; this version uses the LPC's live mapping layer, which breaks every one out.)
The running acreage is the summed land area of every district shown, computed as the true geodesic area of each boundary polygon on the WGS84 ellipsoid. All 159 districts together cover ≈ 4,574 acres, about 7.1 square miles — roughly eight times the size of Central Park. A handful of older districts sit partly inside larger ones (e.g. Carnegie Hill within the Expanded Carnegie Hill district), so about 16 acres are counted in two districts; the unique protected land is closer to 4,557 acres.
The % on each borough chip is the share of that borough's land that sits inside a historic district — the district footprint (counting overlapping districts only once) over the borough's land area (2020 Census). At full extent: Manhattan 12.4% (about one acre in eight), Brooklyn 3.2%, Staten Island 1.1%, Queens 1.0%, The Bronx 1.0% — and 2.4% citywide. The figure climbs as districts appear.
Boundaries, designation dates, district names and the official report links come straight from the LPC's own live ArcGIS layer (Historic_Districts_LPC) — the data behind the commission's official Discover NYC Landmarks map, reached from the LPC maps page. "Designation report" links open the commission's official PDF for each district; "Wikipedia" links run a title search. Base map tiles: OpenStreetMap contributors and CARTO.
The designation date shown is the day the commission voted to designate each area. Boundary polygons are derived by the LPC primarily from Department of City Planning tax-lot data and are simplified slightly here for the web (coordinates rounded to five decimals). Some designations have complicated histories (amended, re-designated or overturned); this map reflects only the districts the LPC currently marks as designated and active.