Geographic Center of NYC? What?
I spotted this marker totally by chance yesterday while wandering aimlessly around Woodside’s twisty-turny streets, roads, places, and lanes. This marker at the intersection of Queens Boulevard and 58th Street indicates that this spot is the geographic center of New York City.
The problem is that this does not appear to be true. At the very least the accuracy of this claim is debatable.
In 2005 the New York Times‘ Michael Pollock cited the Department of City Planning in asserting that “Bushwick, Brooklyn, on Stockholm Street between Wyckoff Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue” is the city’s geographic center.
Something reported as fact by the New York Times does not make it gospel simply because of its source. Nevertheless the designation of Stockholm Street in Bushwick as the city’s geographical center appears to be the consensus view of most sources I could find on the public Internet.
If the difference in calculation was a matter of a few feet I wouldn’t find this so puzzling, but these two locations are not exactly anywhere near each other. I can find no conclusive explanation for the discrepancy or why this marker was placed on Queens Boulevard. The Bushwick location has no such marker, suggesting that some amount of legitimate municipal research went into pinpointing the Woodside location.
Could it be that one calculation is based on city/state borders in the waterways while the other is based solely on land? The official border between New York and New Jersey is in the water around Raritan Bay, between Staten Island and Brooklyn. Adding or subtracting this stretch of water could certainly change geographical calculations.
As errors go I would consider this one harmless. Who really cares or needs to know where the geographic center of this or any city is located? It is not as if the sun rises earlier, beer is free, and water goes down the drain a different direction at the city’s center. It is a harmless badge for a community to wear. The uncertainty of this is curious, though.
