New York EXPLAINED
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Browse by borough

All of New York, by borough.

Your New York and the four others. Pick a borough to follow it across every morning we have covered it, from a Coney Island boardwalk fight to a Bronx housing lottery to a Queens rezoning. Each one fills in as the city moves.

Brooklyn 349 Kings County: brownstones and towers, the waterfront, the biggest borough by a mile. Latest The 40-story The Greenpoint ran on a roaring generator for a month after a Sept. 6 electri… See the borough → Queens 252 The world’s borough: the most diverse county in America, airports to Rockaway. Latest "Spider-Man Way" now marks Ingram Street and Ascan Avenue, steps from Peter Parker's comic… See the borough → Manhattan 421 The island: City Hall, Wall Street, Harlem to the Battery, and the rent that comes with it. Latest DOT finished the Avenue B redesign, making the open street northbound-only from East 7th t… See the borough → The Bronx 237 The only borough on the mainland: the Grand Concourse, the Yankees, the birthplace of hip-hop. Latest Callen-Lorde moved into a clinic at 555 Bergen Ave. five times bigger than its old one, ne… See the borough → Staten Island 43 The forgotten borough: the ferry, the expressway, the one that always feels left out (we don’t). Latest Two residents of the Castleton Park Apartments have Legionnaires' after the building's wat… See the borough →

The five boroughs by the numbers

Queens is the largest borough by land (108.72 square miles), Brooklyn has the most people (2,653,963 as of the Census Bureau’s July 2025 estimate), and Manhattan is the densest (73,471 people per square mile) and the smallest by land (22.66 square miles). Staten Island is the least populous and least dense.

Official Census figures — checked August 2026
Borough Land area (sq mi) People (July 2025 est.) 2020 Census People per sq mi
Queens 108.72 2,358,182 2,405,464 21,690
Brooklyn 69.38 2,653,963 2,736,074 38,253
Staten Island 57.52 501,290 495,747 8,715
The Bronx 42.17 1,406,332 1,472,654 33,349
Manhattan 22.66 1,664,862 1,694,251 73,471
New York City 300.45 8,584,629 8,804,190 28,573

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts — the five boroughs and New York City · NYC Dept. of City Planning — Population Estimates and Trends, July 2026 release · NYC Dept. of City Planning — 2020 Census results for New York City

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