Stare at this image, feel your eyes go slightly out of focus, and all of those shards of blue and terra cotta start to move, circling into a vortex centered somewhere around Governor’s Island. A nice optical trick that re-enacts what the graphic describes: movement. Thousands of Asian New Yorkers moving in and out of neighborhoods, abandoning deacdes-old bastions in Manhattan Chinatown, and transforming eastern Queens and southern Brooklyn.
As reported in the New York Times, the Census Bureau has just released its largest set of data in its history, allowing demographers to create maps like the ones above for the New York metropolitan region, each fragment its own neighborhood story. Perhaps most interesting is what isn’t shown on this map: the seas of darkest blue (representing greatest increase in residents since 2000) in places like Fairview and Guttenberg, Bergenfield and Cliffside Park, Elmont and Hillcrest, Sleepy Hollow, South Floral Park and Spring Valley–New York and New Jersey suburbs where foreign-born residents from the Caribbean, Latin America, and China now comprise up to 60% of the population.
Stay tuned for future posts on this map…