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 and refreshed monthly. 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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