The Downtown Alliance has created an interactive, three-dimensional map of Lower Manhattan that zooms, swoops, pivots, and performs other visual acrobatics, while also searching through multiple data sets, such as residential, office, and hotel properties, as well as restaurants, retailers, transit facilities, cultural institutions, and parks.
This convergence of information and imagery, known as LM3D (which can be found at lm3d.downtownny.com), creates a powerful tool that enables residents, local leaders, business owners, brokers, planners, and investors to look holistically at a neighborhood that is being transformed before their eyes on a near-daily basis.
Updated every 24 hours, LM3D offers a dynamic, comprehensive visualization of the urban streetscape that is America’s third-largest central business district. The interface tracks every current and planned development project south of Chambers Street, and allows users to query specific criteria about an isolated address (e.g., square footage, construction date, floor count, etc.), or take a 30,000-foot view of broad changes along major corridors (such as Broadway, Fulton Street, Water Street, or the World Trade Center).
“Lower Manhattan is rapidly changing,” says Downtown Alliance president Jessica Lappin, “and LM3D gives us the opportunity to empower planners, investors, residents, brokers and all stakeholders in the community, with the ability to see what’s happening in close-to-real time. We hope that it will be a helpful planning tool for everyone involved in the successful and continued evolution of this dynamic neighborhood.”
LM3D draws upon data compiled not only by researchers at the Alliance, but also from the Property Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) statistics maintained by the City’s Department of Finance, as well as the City’s Open Street Map Data project.
The mission of the Downtown Alliance, which created LM3D, is to enhance Lower Manhattan for businesses, residents and visitors. The Alliance also provides local security and trash pickup, as well as operating the business improvement district, or BID, that covers the area south of Chambers Street. Among the services provided by the Alliance that Lower Manhattan residents especially prize is the Downtown Connection shuttle, which ferries passengers (free of charge) between more than 30 local stops that link residential areas with business and shopping districts, as part of a partnership with the Battery Park City Authority.