One Man's Quest to Visit Every Census Tract in New York

Down abandoned tunnels and across untamed islands, a dogged demographer's decade-long mission to visit every Census tract in New York takes him to some of the city's least inhabited quarters.

New York is a big place. Exploring it is a pretty decent undertaking. If you want to see as much as you can, get the broadest experience possible, it helps to have some sort of a plan. There are a lot of different ways to go about this. In 2000, Dave Frattini wrote a book entitled “The Underground Guide to New York City Subways” detailing his trip to each of the 468 subway stations in New York City. Other people have tried to visit each of the fifty-one community boards, or all 176 zip codes. One friend of mine, Matt Green, is even attempting to walk every street in New York City—although that’s a full-time, years-long undertaking.

I’m a demographer, someone who studies population and how it changes, so I’m pretty familiar with the most common way to analyze the population: by Census tract. These are simply a geographic creation of the United States Census Bureau, designed to break the country up into bite-sized chunks of about 4,000 people each—a geography small enough to analyze the …