City’s Land Mass Shrinks, New Survey Says

Community Board 7 takes pride in the fact that it is the largest of all 59 community boards in New York City. But as a result of a recent finding by the Department of City Planning, Community Board 7 and New York City are smaller than had been believed.

According to the Green Book, the city’s official directory, the five boroughs of New York City encompass 322 square miles of land. But a review by Michael Miller, a geographer for the Department of City Planning, found that the city is about 17 square miles smaller than it actually is at 304.8 square miles, according to a report in the May 22 New York Times.

The discovery was made after Miller, at the behest of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recalculated the city’s land mass through a months-long careful review of shorelines via digital high-resolution aerial photographs.

This is where Community Board 7 is involved. When boundaries were first issued for community boards in 1977, a rather rough method was used that did not strictly adhere to land lines. Powell’s Cove, a coastal inlet at College Point, was included in Board 7’s boundaries. The new boundary does not include Powell’s Cove. Likewise, Community Board 9 in The Bronx, had Pugsley’s Creek included in its boundaries in 1977 and too, has had a correction.

Miller, the deputy director on information technology for DCP, said the losses in land mass were distributed throughout the city. “There’s no neighborhood that’s vanished,” he said in the May 22 Times report.

The land area of each of the city’s 59 community boards is important because that is the basis each board uses to determine the number of people they serve. Community Board 7 routinely begins each of its monthly meetings with the statement, “Community Board 7 is the largest of all 59 boards in the city.”

Serving a little under 250,000 people, according to the Queens Community Boards Web site, Board 7 includes the neighborhoods of (most of) Flushing, Bay Terrace, Beechhurst, College Point, Malba, Queensborough Hill, Whitestone, and Willets Point.

Powell’s Cove was probably named after the Powell family that owned the land in 1873. It is also the name of a waterfront park established in 1999 to protect wetlands. While major waterways more than 50 feet wide are excluded from land mass, small interior bodies of water, like Meadow and Willow Lakes in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, are included.

When it was realized that the Department of Planning had the advanced computerized technology needed to surpass previous inaccuracies, it was decided that a recalculation was in order.

When Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island joined Manhattan and The Bronx in 1898 to become New York City, the first estimate of the city’s increased land mass was 360 square miles. The new estimate reduces the size of the city by 5 percent. In 1998 the city lost most of Ellis Island’s 27.5 acres to New Jersey in a Supreme Court ruling.

Brooklyn had the most loss of land mass, shrinking from 82 square miles to 72 square miles. New York City is 14th in land area among cities with more than 100,000 people, according to the U.S. Census.

The new estimate of the city land mass will be published in the 2008 Green Book available next month.

BY RICHARD GENTILVISO
Queens Gazette