Found: The Manhattan Apartment that’s the Farthest from any Subway

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Quantitative Analysis of NYC Open Data: Every data set that the city releases tells a story. This blog is all about telling those stories, one data set at a time.

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October 9, 2014

If there is one thing I learned while living on the Upper East Side many years ago, it’s that York Avenue is quite a hike from the subway (at least as far as hikes from subways in Manhattan go). That fact can sometimes help keep housing prices down, at least until the 2nd Avenue Line comes in.

All that hiking got me wondering: What residential building in Manhattan is farthest from a subway station entrance? Is it in the Upper East Side? The Lower East Side? The West Side?

Well, in the spirit of my earlier Starbucks-Distance analysis, I turned to Open Data to answer that question once and for all. To do so, I merged two data sets, the MTA Subway Station Entrance data set and PLUTO, which gives information on all lots in NYC. I then calculated the distance from the center of each lot to the nearest station.The map of lots colored by distance from subway entrances looks like this (with green being close and red being far):

And there on the map lies the farthest residential building from a subway entrance in Manhattan according to my analysis: 10 Gracie Square, located at the end of 84th street at the FDR Drive. It is 0.7 miles from the subway station as the crow flies, or 0.8 miles using the grid. My favorite part about the finding is that the Penthouse, which I guess is literally the farthest place you can live from the subway due to the longer ride down in the elevator, is currently on the market for $18.9 million, down from $23 million last year. That’s right, you can pay $18.9 million dollars to have literally the longest walk to the subway in all of Manhattan! But fear not power walkers, there is also a two bedroom listed with a the same walk but a slightly shorter elevator ride… for $3.75 million.

Update:
I’ve added a Google Doc for you to look up your own residential address and see how you compare to the rest of Manhattan.

MTA Subway Station Entrance is here.
NYC Lot information via PLUTO is here.
Analysis done in QGIS.
Longest Distances measured as the crow flies.
Data is only as complete as PLUTO, and so newer buildings on Roosevelt Island seem to be missing.

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12:37am

(Notes: 368)