Every building in Bostonby the year it was built
The map opens on today’s skyline. Play or scrub to explore recorded dates; undated buildings stay visible as optional present-day context. Documented former buildings appear in rust and disappear in their demolition year. Historical coverage is partial; missing buildings and dates remain unknown.
120,844dated surviving buildings built by this year
2,346 undated footprints are context only, not evidence they existed in the selected year.
Rust: 57 former buildings · partial history. Dots show locations only.
drag to pan · ⌘ or Ctrl and scroll to zoom · hold ⌃ and drag to tilt
heights ×6 at this zoom
Overture Maps buildings outlines · Analyze Boston FY2026 property assessment and MassGIS statewide parcels years
heights exaggerated when zoomed out
Boston in 123,190 buildings.
Every structure in the Overture footprint data inside the mapped area of Boston, garages and sheds included.
Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels or explicit mapped construction dates. Parcel dates can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding. 2,346 buildings have no year at all and remain grey as optional present-day context.
200 Clarendon. Built 1976. Heights come from lidar or the source data where we have it. Otherwise we estimate from floor counts.
Bellingham-Cary House. We take this only from buildings with their own record, never from an area estimate.
Dates come from building inventories, assessor parcels and explicit mapped construction dates. A parcel date can describe the main building rather than every outbuilding.
Which decades are left.
Each bar counts surviving buildings with a recorded date in that decade. A short bar can reflect fewer surviving buildings or missing construction dates. It does not measure everything built or demolished during that decade.
Colour, height, and what to trust.
Drag to pan. Hold ⌃ or use the right mouse button to tilt. Scrub the timeline to stop on any year. Everything you change goes into the address bar, so copy the URL or press Share and the other person sees exactly what you see.
- Decade built. Warm colours mark the oldest buildings left and cool colours the newest, one step per decade from 1910 on.
- Grey. No construction year on record. Undated buildings stay visible as present-day context throughout the timeline. Hide them with “Show undated present-day buildings” to view dated records alone.
- Height mode. Switch the colour from age to height and the same boxes become a relief map of where Boston is tall.
- Heights are exaggerated when you zoom out. At the widest view they stand up to forty times taller, so a whole city still reads as a skyline. From zoom 15 in, the boxes are at true scale.
Where these buildings come from.
- Coverage target: 1800–2026. 120,844 of 123,190 current footprints have a recorded construction year (98%). 2,346 remain undated. These counts cover the map’s extraction area, which can extend beyond city boundaries.
- Historical records are incomplete across 1800–present. Missing buildings, unknown demolition dates and undocumented replacements remain gaps; an empty location in an earlier year does not establish that the site was vacant.
- 57 documented former buildings with usable lifetimes in this dataset. Scrub back in time to see them appear and disappear. Standing-building counts and charts exclude these historical records.
- Repeated census-tract median dates, including 1938, are no longer assigned as construction years. Undated buildings remain unknown; recorded 1938 dates are retained.
- The main footprints describe surviving buildings. The rust historical layer adds documented former buildings only between their construction and demolition years. Dots mark locations where a historical outline is unavailable. This is a partial reconstruction, not a complete inventory of past buildings.
- Heights are measured where the source has them and estimated from floor counts otherwise. 115,431 of 123,190 are measured.
- Below zoom 12.5 the map draws 100 m cells instead of individual footprints, so you can see a whole city at once. Cells use the median recorded year of their current buildings; zoom in for individual outlines and construction years.
- Built 2026-09-09. This is a snapshot, not a live feed.
- history
OpenStreetMap lifecycle records + Wikidata lifetimes
Partial coverage · retrieved 2026-09-09
Historical source ↗Wikidata locations are CC0; OpenStreetMap records are ODbL. Local historical outlines retain their source attribution in each building’s details.
Wikidata building lifetimes ↗ - footprints
Overture Maps buildings
ODbL-1.0 / CDLA-Permissive-2.0
View the source ↗ - footprints
OpenStreetMap contributors
ODbL-1.0
View the source ↗ - heights
Microsoft ML Buildings
ODbL-1.0
View the source ↗ - years
Analyze Boston FY2026 property assessment and MassGIS statewide parcels
PDDL-1.0 (Boston) / open data (Commonwealth of Massachusetts)
View the source ↗ - years
OpenStreetMap building construction dates
ODbL-1.0 · OpenStreetMap contributors
View the source ↗ - heights
USACE National Structure Inventory
Public domain (US Army Corps of Engineers)
View the source ↗
Put Boston on paper.
A browser tab is a fine place to lose an hour, but it is not a wall. The studio prints a street map of the same place in colours you pick, with your own words underneath.
Nearby skylines.
Providence
Rhode Island, United States- Buildings
- From
- 79,352
- 1808
Portland
Maine, United States- Buildings
- From
- 26,814
- 1807
The Bronx
New York, United States- Buildings
- From
- 1,671,379
- 1800
Queens
New York, United States- Buildings
- From
- 1,671,379
- 1800