New York City's most crowded streets and neighborhoods: study
NEW YORK (PIX11) — A doctoral student enrolled at Cornell University took to the streets of New York City to find out which ones were the most crowded.
Matthew Franchi, a computer science PhD candidate, found that most of the streets are in Manhattan.
"New York City is a large place; almost 469 square miles of pretty dense civilization," Franchi's GitHub website states. "While a neighborhood's atmosphere is, of course, a function of time, it is possible to get an average consensus of how 'crowded' each neighborhood feels by averaging over time. When we say 'crowded,' we mean not just with people; we also mean with static objects or street furniture, or, to get even more colloquial, 'clutter.' When we mix 'crowdedness' within the narrow environment of NYC's sidewalks, we endeavor to call this feeling' claustrophobia,' a direct mapping to the definition in psychology."
Top 10 most "claustrophobic" neighborhoods in Manhattan:
- Times Square
- Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square
- Greenwich Village
- SoHo-Little Italy-Hudson Square
- East Midtown-Turtle Bay
- West Village
- Financial District-Battery Park City
- Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill
- Tribeca-Civic Center
- Murray Hill-Kips Bay
If you would like to know the other most-crowded streets in New York City — Brooklyn Heights and DUMBO, among them — you can read more about Frenchi's study and methodology here.
Matthew Euzarraga is a multimedia journalist from El Paso, Texas. He has covered local news and LGBTQIA topics in the New York City Metro area since 2021. He joined the PIX11 Digital team in 2023. You can see more of his work here.