Introduction

During my first semester at Pratt Institute, I worked on a design-thinking project for which my team worked with the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC) to design an educational digital product with the goal of increasing awareness of local NYC landmarks. 

According to the LPC’s website, “The Landmarks Preservation Commission is the largest municipal preservation agency in the nation. It is responsible for protecting New York City’s architecturally, historically, and culturally significant buildings and sites by granting them landmark or historic district status, and regulating them after designation.” 

I was very excited when I came across datasets about NYC historic districts and landmarks on the NYC OpenData website, and I thought it would be interesting to visualize the topic of one of my past projects as part of this class. 

I decided to focus my maps on 3 LPC designations:

1. Individual Landmarks: “Exteriors of individual buildings and sites, ranging from farmhouses to skyscrapers”
2. Historic Districts: “Areas of the city that possess architectural and historical significance and a distinct “sense of place.”
3. Scenic Landmarks: “City-owned parks or other landscape features, such as Prospect Park, Central Park and Ocean Parkway”

I was interested in exploring the following questions:

1. How are scenic landmarks and historic districts distributed across NYC boroughs?
2. Which parks/landscape features fall under the category of scenic landmarks? 
3. How are historic landmarks distributed across NYC?
4. Are historic landmarks only found within historic districts in NYC?

Referenced Visualizations

I found a map created by the LPC in ArcGIS. The map shows all buildings in NYC but only the different types of designated landmarks in NYC e.g. individual landmarks, scenic landmarks, historic districts, interior landmarks, historic buildings and sites etc. have colour filled in. In my maps, I only showed landmarks and did not include all other buildings to keep my maps cleaner and focused. The LPC’s map includes labels that pop up when one clicks on an individual landmark which inspired me to do the same in my map. The LPC’s map also uses labels to represent the different boroughs. However, in my opinion that looks a little messy which is why I decided to colour-code the boroughs in my maps. 

Datasets and Tools

I used 5 datasets for my maps:

1. A shapefile of NYC’s borough boundaries ( 5 rows)
2. A shapefile of NYC’s scenic landmarks (11 rows)
3. A shapefile of NYC’s historic districts (156 rows)
4. A shapefile of NYC’s landmark-designated buildings (37,459 rows)
5. A shapefile of NYC’s park properties (2,035 rows)

I visualized 2 qualitative dimensions from the landmark-designated buildings dataset – building type and architecture style in Tableau. I created my maps in QGIS, a free and open-source software for creating geospatial visualizations. 

Methodology

I looked through the NYC OpenData website to find GIS datasets that looked interesting to me. Since I had already worked on a project for the LPC for one of my other classes at Pratt, I was drawn to the datasets which contained information pertaining to historic districts and landmarks. In addition to the datasets related to landmarks and historic districts, I looked for a dataset which shows the borough boundaries of NYC to include as an additional layer in my map. I even found a dataset that shows all the parks in NYC to visualize how many parks have been given the designation of a scenic landmark. None of the datasets required cleaning.  I visualized my maps using QGIS and created supplemental charts in Tableau. 

Interpretations of Visualizations

My first map answers Q1: How are scenic landmarks and historic districts distributed across NYC boroughs? & Q2: Which parks/landscape features fall under the category of scenic landmarks? 

This is a zoomed out view of the first map. This map shows the historic districts and scenic landmarks across NYC. I colour-coded the different boroughs and included a legend to make it easy for anyone not familiar with NYC geography to understand the locations and boundaries of different boroughs. I added labels for the scenic landmarks. I did not add labels for the historic districts because there are a lot more historic districts than scenic landmarks, and adding labels for both categories would have over-crowded the map with text. As a work-around, I included map tips for the historic districts layer so that when a viewer hovers over a historic district, a box pops up which displays the name of the historic district. 

From looking at the map, it’s clear that Manhattan and Brooklyn have far more scenic landmarks and historic districts as compared to Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. It’s interesting to note how even though there are 2,035 parks in NYC (represented by red areas in the map below), only a handful have been given the scenic landmark designation (represented by green areas in the map below). 

The third map I created answers Q3: How are historic landmarks distributed across NYC? & Q4: Are historic landmarks only found within historic districts in NYC?

This map shows the distributions of the historic districts and historic landmarks across NYC. It’s not clear since this is the zoomed out view, but upon zooming in, viewers are able to see whether the historic landmarks always fall within a historic district  – the answer is no. 

Following a trend seen in the earlier maps, we see that the historic landmarks are the most concentrated in Manhattan, followed by Brooklyn. In comparison, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island have fewer buildings that have been given the historic landmark designation. It’s possible that this is due to the fact that the community boards (i.e. district-level city governments who submit applications for landmark designation) in Manhattan and Brooklyn are more active and involved in the landmarks designation process as compared to community boards in Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. 

I included map tips in this map as well so that viewers can learn a historic district’s  name by hovering over it on the map. I used a black line to clearly establish the boundaries of the historic districts to viewers. 

I created 2 charts in Tableau to show the breakdown of building types and architectural styles for the designated landmarks for additional context. To ensure that the chart wasn’t cluttered with too many boxes, I filtered out any values under 20 for both the counts of the building type and architectural style. The most common building types for designated landmarks are row house, free-standing house, garage, and apartment building. The most common architectural styles are Renaissance Revival, neo-Grec, Italianate, and Romanesque Revival. 

Reflection & Self-Critique

I am quite pleased with the final outcome given the fact that this was the first time I created visualizations in QGIS. I found it easier to learn how to use QGIS compared to Tableau and R, possibly because I’m familiar with the concept of layering in Figma/Illustrator. That being said, QGIS is a massive product and I barely scratched the surface of all of its capabilities while working on this project. I believe I could dedicate an entire semester to just learning QGIS and that’s when I will really start feeling comfortable with the tool and my mapping abilities. Overall though, I enjoyed creating different geospatial visualizations in QGIS and I was very happy about the fact that I was able to find a way to display labels when hovering over a map element with the help of the map tips feature. 

There are several ways I would like to improve or take this project a step further:

1. Explore the best way to visualize boundaries on a map – for this project since I was interested in learning about how landmarks are distributed across NYC boroughs, I used a shapefile of borough boundaries. However, I would like to explore how the map looks if I were to use census tracts or district boundaries instead. I wonder if that would provide more context to viewers. 
2. I wanted to explore if there is a correlation between historic districts and property values. My hypothesis is that property values are higher in historic districts compared to other parts of NYC. I found a dataset of the NYC property values on the NYC OpenData website. However, since the dataset contains 6 million rows, I struggled to open the file in QGIS. If I had been able to visualize the correlation between historic districts and property values, that would have certainly added another element to my storytelling and hence, I would like to try and incorporate this data into my map in the future. 

References

About LPC – LPC. (n.d.). www.nyc.gov. https://www.nyc.gov/site/lpc/about/about-lpc.page

​​(n.d.). Discover New York City Landmarks [Review of Discover New York City Landmarks]. NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission. https://nyclpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=93a88691cace4067828b1eede432022b

(n.d.). NYC OpenData [Review of NYC OpenData]. NYC OpenData; nyc.gov. https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/

(2013). Boundaries of Boroughs (water areas excluded) [Review of Boundaries of Boroughs (water areas excluded)]. NYC OpenData. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Borough-Boundaries/tqmj-j8zm

(2015). Historic Districts [Review of Historic Districts]. NYC OpenData. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Historic-Districts/xbvj-gfnw

(2015). Scenic Landmarks [Review of Scenic Landmarks]. NYC OpenData. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/Scenic-Landmarks/gi7d-8gt5

(2018). LPC Individual Landmark and Historic District Building Database [Review of LPC Individual Landmark and Historic District Building Database]. NYC OpenData. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Housing-Development/LPC-Individual-Landmark-and-Historic-District-Buil/7mgd-s57w

(2020, March 9). Parks Properties [Review of Parks Properties]. NYC OpenData; NYC OpenData. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Recreation/Parks-Properties/enfh-gkve