Brooklyn-based urban planner Bahij Chancey designed the current version of NYC Atlas in a single week, after years of iterating on the idea. (Photo courtesy of Chancey)
A Brooklyn MIT alum combines cartography and art to create an interactive database of NYC, with all 70 maps in one place.
BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
Which NYC neighborhood has the most rats? The best bagels? The widest sidewalks? The greatest density of pizzerias? (Spoiler: not Little Italy.) And what did your block look like in 1940? 1800? 1609? What melody would you hear if each subway line played its own note as trains arrived at a station?
You can find answers to all these questions and more on NYC Atlas, a free online catalogue of nearly 70 interactive maps recently launched by Bahij Chancey.
Growing up, Chancey would gaze at the world map on his bedroom wall as he fell asleep, overcome with a bittersweet sense of FOMO.
“I never wanted to go to sleep,” said Chancey. “I always felt like I was missing something. But when I could see the whole world, I knew that there were places where it was still daytime.”
At age 35, Chancey has built a career around his love of maps — a trained architectural draughtsman with degrees from MIT and Yale, he now serves as the managing director of WXY Studios, one of the city’s premier urban planning outfits.
But Chancey has another equally fervent passion: civic engagement. Before WXY, Chancey worked at the nonprofit Green City Force, sat on the board of the advocacy group Transportation Alternatives, volunteered for the Parks Department through AmeriCorps, and joined Brooklyn’s Community Board 6 as a public member.
NYC Atlas marries Chancey’s overlapping interests, gathering a collection of maps that are just as likely to make you laugh with pure cartographic appreciation as they are to inspire you to call your local representative.
“What I like about most of the maps on this site is they’re pretty accessible,” said Chancey, a longtime resident of northwest Brooklyn. “People are able to dig in and find out information about the city that I think in many cases is hidden.”
The idea for NYC Atlas had been bouncing around Chancey’s head for years, as he slowly accumulated a spreadsheet of his favorite finds — he even built several prototypes, though he was never satisfied with any of them.
But the site officially released in April, thanks in part to AI tools that sped up the development process. The first iteration of the current look only took one week to make, which “completely shocked” Chancey, who leaned on back-end platforms like Vercel and Superbase that wouldn’t be expensive to maintain.
“This was a late night thing for me,” said Chancey. “My partner jokes that after she goes to bed at 10 p.m. is when I get into my crazy projects.”
While NYC Atlas initially centered on utilitarian entries like election maps, the catalogue now includes a wide range of playful creations that blur the line between cartography and art.
One of Chancey’s favorites from this camp is “Everything is Everything,” by Mark Varley and Jessi Highet. This zany map of bagel shops throughout the city was conceived as a companion piece to the couple’s main endeavor at the time: Walking five marathons per week, or 7,000 miles total, around the five boroughs over the course of a single year.
The catalogue ranges from the silly — a guide to the best and worst bagels in all five boroughs (above) — to the practical, like a round-up of community board schedules.
Although Varley and Highet stopped updating “Everything is Everything” in 2024, it still holds 202 starred reviews of the city’s best and worst bagels, with the top two honors going to Queens and Brooklyn — Hot Bagels in Middle Village received the sole 5-star nod, with Olde Brooklyn Bagel Shoppe in Prospect Heights following closely behind at 4.75. (The exercise also yielded such nuggets of wisdom as “Toasting raises the floor of a bagel but lowers the ceiling,” and “An irregularly shaped bagel will almost always taste better than a perfectly round bagel.”)
NYC Atlas boasts a thriving history section, too: photographs dating back to the 1800s sit alongside noise complaints from the Roaring Twenties, plus a compendium of biographical details about the people behind co-named streets.
Yet no map takes a longer view than “Welikia,” a collaboration between Eric Anderson and the New York Botanical Garden that leverages both archival research and ecological data to visualize the city as it existed in 1609. Users can slide the timeline to watch the Rockaways disappear underwater; this journalist’s childhood home in Carroll Gardens was once a thick forest of oaks and hickories, opening onto a salt marsh.
Chancey came across some maps by chance, and many emerged through meeting fellow urban planners via work. Others he had to coax into existence: “Rat Map,” by Chancey’s high school classmate Evan Coleman, was originally a dashboard of rat sightings by zip code that Chancey asked his friend to turn into a map.
Ultimately, Chancey hopes that NYC Atlas will do more than entertain. He envisions it as one part of a larger work-in-progress, tentatively titled New York City Civics, that could incorporate a wiki and video series to demystify the inner workings of local government.
“I ended up building this first because it feels like a helpful and interesting standalone tool,” said Chancey. “But I’m really passionate about how people engage with government, and how people use their power as a citizen or resident of a place in order to shape their communities and their city.”
