Mayor Absconds With 17 Square Miles Of City; Brooklyn Hit Hardest

It’s like a punch in the gut, like hearing that sweet 18 year-old you’ve been dating is actually more like 16:

For two decades, the city’s official directory, the Green Book, has stated definitively that the five boroughs encompass nearly 322 square miles of land.

Not so, Mr. Miller and his staff recently discovered: New York’s land area actually totals 304.8 square miles.

The shrinkage generally is not the result of rising sea levels from global warming or beach erosion or any other act of nature. It is largely the work of man, mainly Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose yen to precisely measure everything from poverty to traffic congestion led the planning department to recalculate the city’s land mass.

Acting on the mayor’s mandate, Mr. Miller and his team spent months analyzing thousands of digitized, high-resolution aerial photographs of the squiggling shoreline and other geographic features to calculate the city’s size anew.

“This is not a reflection of a change in the physical area, but a refinement of the measurement,” Mr. Miller said.

Seventeen square miles may not seem like much. But consider:

• 17 square miles could accommodate 13 more Central Parks, nearly a third of Washington, D.C., about three dozen versions of Vatican City and nearly two dozen replicas of Monaco.
• If 17 square miles were populated at Manhattan’s density, New York might be home to as many as 1.1 million more people.
• At the price of an acre in Midtown, as recently computed by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 17 square miles could be worth $1 trillion.