New York City Parks Recreation Percentages and Acreage

A 2026 dataset lists public open spaces in New York City, primarily managed by NYC Parks, including partner sites like Central Park. It provides the percentage and acreage of land designated for active versus passive recreation in each space. The data is maintained by the City of New York for environmental review purposes.

Use Cases

• Classify parks by RECREATION CATEGORY and TYPE CATEGORY using features like ACTIVE PERCENT and PASSIVE PERCENT.
• Analyze the distribution of OPEN SPACE ACRES, ACTIVE ACRES, and PASSIVE ACRES across different BOROUGHs.
• Map park locations and attributes by joining on geospatial SHAPE data or ZIPCODE(S).
• Identify parks for potential development by filtering on low ACTIVE PERCENT values in high-population BORO CENSUS TRACT(S).
• Correlate recreational land use (ACTIVE ACRES vs PASSIVE ACRES) with demographic data using census tract identifiers.

Strengths

• Includes 14 specific columns detailing park names, acreage, percentages, and location identifiers.
• Covers a major metropolitan area (New York City) with diverse park types and managing entities.
• Data is updated to February 2026, indicating maintained relevance.

Limitations

• The total number of park records (rows) is unknown, preventing assessment of sample size.
• Data is explicitly intended for a specific regulatory process (CEQR), which may limit generalizability for other analyses.
• Relies on external data dictionary for correct interpretation, increasing the barrier to initial use.

Provenance

Source

City of New York via the data.cityofnewyork.us portal.

Collection Method

Compiled and managed by NYC Parks and partner agencies for environmental review.

Time Range

Snapshot as of 2026; temporal coverage of the underlying data is null.

Freshness

Last updated February 2026.

Geography

New York City, USA, with BOROUGH and ZIPCODE(S) granularity.