Methodology

How this map of New York City houses of worship was built — sources, limits, and what it does and doesn't show.

Data source

Every point on the map comes from OpenStreetMap (OSM), queried through the Overpass API on 2026-05-11. The query pulls every feature tagged amenity=place_of_worship inside the New York City administrative boundary (OSM relation 175905):

[out:json][timeout:180];
area(3600175905)->.nyc;
(
  node["amenity"="place_of_worship"](area.nyc);
  way["amenity"="place_of_worship"](area.nyc);
  relation["amenity"="place_of_worship"](area.nyc);
);
out center tags;

That returned 2,847 features inside the five boroughs. (An earlier version of this map used a bounding box and pulled in ~1,300 sites from Newark, Jersey City, Hackensack, Yonkers, and Nassau County — those have been removed.)

Classification

OSM tags each place of worship with a religion value (e.g., christian, jewish, muslim) and, optionally, a denomination (e.g., catholic, baptist, orthodox). The processing script (process.py) maps those raw values to eight top-level groups — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, Other, Unknown/unspecified — and to a curated list of denomination labels.

Notable classification choices:

Catholic combines OSM's catholic, roman_catholic, and greek_catholic tags.
Orthodox Christian combines Greek, Russian, Romanian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Antiochian, and Syriac Orthodox sub-tags.
Methodist combines United Methodist, African Methodist Episcopal, AME Zion, and Free Methodist.
Pentecostal includes Assemblies of God and Church of God.
Jewish — Orthodox includes Hasidic and Modern Orthodox where tagged as such; most Jewish sites in OSM lack a denomination tag and fall into Jewish — Unspecified.
Muslim — Sunni / Shia are kept separate where tagged, but only ~15% of Muslim sites are tagged with a specific tradition; the rest are Muslim — Unspecified.
Christian — unspecified covers any Christian site with no denomination tag in OSM. This is the largest single label in the dataset (~1,600 sites) and reflects OSM's tagging gaps more than any actual non-denominational identity.

What this map is

A map of physical sites tagged as places of worship — buildings, storefronts, and dedicated rooms.
The most current crowdsourced inventory available without scraping individual denominational directories.

What this map is not

Not a map of religious adherents. A neighborhood with many small storefront churches is not necessarily more Christian than one with a single megachurch.
Not authoritative. OSM is volunteer-maintained. Some sites are missing; some closed sites may still appear; some denomination tags are wrong or stale.
Not weighted by congregation size. A 5,000-seat cathedral and a one-room storefront church are equal dots.
Not a complete picture of Jewish New York. Many Hasidic shtiebels operate out of unmarked rooms and apartments; they are largely invisible to OSM. For Jewish geography, the UJA-Federation Jewish Community Study is far more reliable.
Not a count of Muslim sites. A meaningful number of NYC mosques operate out of rented commercial space and may not appear in OSM.

Known limitations of OSM tagging

~40% of the dataset (1,744 sites) is missing a denomination tag entirely.
OSM's denomination vocabulary is inconsistent — both catholic and roman_catholic appear; both nondenominational and non-denominational; etc. The processing script normalizes the common cases but rare misspellings fall into Christian — unspecified.
Closed-but-still-mapped buildings are not systematically removed in OSM. Some dots represent sites that no longer hold services.

Reproducing this map

Three files: overpass-query.txt (the Overpass query), process.py (classification + reduction), and index.html (the Leaflet front end). Run:

curl -X POST -d @overpass-query.txt https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter -o raw.json
python3 process.py     # writes data.json
# then serve the folder over HTTP

Better sources for specific traditions

Christian (all denominations): the U.S. Religion Census (ASARB, 2020) reports adherent counts by county.
Catholic: Archdiocese of New York and Diocese of Brooklyn publish parish boundaries and Mass-attendance figures.
Jewish: UJA-Federation Jewish Community Study (2023 update).
Houses of worship in the city's property records: NYC PLUTO building class codes M1–M9.

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