“Is my building a landmark?” – CityMap Edition

Last week we shared one tip on how to find out if your building is a landmark. Today, we’d like to offer a second. CityMap has a helpful feature that allows you to see LPC-designated historic districts, and individual (exterior), interior, and scenic landmarks.

This is a great resource if you happen to be more of a visual person, or if you just like to see historic districts and landmarks in context with the rest of the city (however, calendared buildings aren’t available on this map).

This is what CityMap looks like with the “Designated Historic District” layer checked (visible in the red box at right). The city historic districts in this portion of Manhattan are in blue. Remember that every property within the boundary of a historic district is considered a landmark, and is regulated by the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The red arrow points to “Show Additional Data on Map,” which you need to click on to access the Landmark layer (and other useful layers). Just note that this text bar is located on the bottom of the sidebar when you first access the site, but moves to the top of the sidebar (as seen above) after you click on it.

Clicking on a historic district brings up a pop-up box, which shows the name of the district, when it was designated, etc. At this distance, you can also see street names, so if you are wondering if a building at the corner of Christopher Street and West 4th Street is in the Greenwich Village Historic District, for example, you can see with this view that it is.

If you have a particular address you’re searching for, type it in to the “Search for a location” bar visible at the top of this screen capture. Here I’ve used 425 Sixth Avenue (aka the Jefferson Market Library), which CityMap highlighted in red for me to easily find. From here you can also look around and see what other buildings are in this historic district, or what buildings may be just out of it. You’ll need to turn off the historic district layer if you want to be able to click on each property to get more information about each.

The image at the beginning of this post also shows blue ribbon icons, which denotes individual landmarks. If you click on these, the name of the landmark, its designation year, etc. will pop up. Same thing goes for interior and scenic landmarks. And that’s a wrap for our latest entry in our Landmarking 101 series! Find out what else you can do with CityMap by clicking here.