Where the boundaries come from
This page doesn't ship a hand-drawn outline. The buttons above the map download the boundary from OpenStreetMap (through the Nominatim service), simplified to about 10 metres so the file stays small:
- New York City – OpenStreetMap relation 175905, the city limits
- Manhattan (New York County), Brooklyn (Kings County), Queens (Queens County), the Bronx (Bronx County) and Staten Island (Richmond County)
Each shape gets a name, a source and an osm_id property so you always know where it came from. Load several boroughs and export them together as one FeatureCollection.
Why the area includes water
New York's legal city limits run through the surrounding water — the harbour, the rivers and part of the Lower Bay. The OpenStreetMap boundary follows those limits, so the city outline measures roughly 470 square miles, while New York's land area is about 300 square miles. If you need shoreline-clipped shapes, see below.
Official alternatives
For official or legal work, NYC's Department of City Planning publishes Borough Boundaries on NYC Open Data, both clipped to the shoreline and with water areas included (GeoJSON, KML and Shapefile). Download one there and open it here with Import to view, measure, edit or convert it.
Licence
OpenStreetMap data is © OpenStreetMap contributors and available under the Open Database License (ODbL). You may use it, including commercially, if you credit OpenStreetMap and share changes to the data under the same licence.
Other places
Type any city, county, state, country or park into the search box on the map, press Enter, then press Outline next to the right result to add its boundary. Very detailed boundaries (whole countries with long coastlines) can take a moment to load.