{"id":364912,"date":"2026-10-05T16:34:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T16:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/364912\/"},"modified":"2026-10-05T16:34:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T16:34:19","slug":"inside-a-photographers-journey-to-visit-every-neighborhood-in-new-york-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/364912\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside a photographer’s journey to visit every neighborhood in New York City"},"content":{"rendered":"

For the past three years, Rob Stephenson has been on a mission to photograph every single neighborhood in New York City. Each week, he picks one and spends several hours walking around with a camera in hand. He eventually uploads those photos \u2014 along with archival images and written research about the community \u2014 to a Substack newsletter called The Neighborhoods<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The photographer, who grew up in Connecticut and currently lives in Brooklyn, started \u201cThe Neighborhoods\u201d out of a desire to better understand the city he has considered home for more than 20 years. The concept of visiting every neighborhood is \u201creally just an excuse to break it into chunks so it\u2019s more manageable, you know?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In Williamsbridge.<\/p>\n

Rob Stephenson<\/p>\n

Stephenson has visited about 150 neighborhoods so far, which he estimates puts him at about halfway through the project. He said the exact number of places he has left to explore seems to keep changing as he continues the project. Sometimes he feels compelled to split areas into sub-neighborhoods, as he recently did with Richmond Hill in Queens. He looks to a crowdsourced map of the city\u2019s neighborhoods<\/a> \u2014 which the New York Times published three years ago \u2014 as a North Star, given how arbitrary these borders can feel.<\/p>\n

I met up with Stephenson a couple weeks ago in Williamsbridge<\/a>, an area of the Bronx off Gun Hill Road. As we climbed up and down the neighborhood\u2019s sloping sidewalks, pausing every so often so Stephenson could photograph a unique doorway or a funny sign, he told me about how the project has made him more observant. There are things he has come to think of as quintessentially New York after spotting them across the five boroughs, like storefront churches and handball courts.<\/p>\n

In Williamsbridge.<\/p>\n

Rob Stephenson<\/p>\n

He hasn\u2019t been able to stop seeing stainless steel fences after belatedly reading an article<\/a> from 2022 about them becoming a status symbol in immigrant communities. These shiny gates also appeared (sometimes with gilded accents) throughout Williamsbridge, a once Jewish and Italian American neighborhood that has seen an influx of Caribbean immigrants since the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Stephenson said the shifts in neighborhood demographics can manifest in rather unusual ways. He noticed a pattern in the canned goods propping up air-conditioning window units across the Bronx: \u201cI thought it was interesting because I was in Belmont, which is still the Italian neighborhood of the Bronx, and they had San Marzano tomato cans holding them up,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then a few neighborhoods over, they had [Old] El Paso cans. This is a big Jamaican neighborhood, so maybe I\u2019ll find some cans to support my theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Williamsbridge.<\/p>\n

Rob Stephenson<\/p>\n

Stephenson attended school in Colorado and spent time in Boston, Chicago and coastal Chile before settling in New York in 2003. He previously worked as an archivist for the renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz, which he jokingly referred to as \u201cmy MFA.\u201d The experience shaped his work ethic.<\/p>\n

Stephenson tends to blindly wander a neighborhood at least once before researching it online. After that initial visit, he trawls through the archives of the Times and defunct newspapers such as the Brooklyn Daily Times, the Brooklyn Eagle and the New York Herald, looking for intriguing mentions. I joined him on his second trip to Williamsbridge, when he pulled up a phone app called Urban Archive that pins historical photos and digital stories to an interactive map.<\/p>\n

In Williamsbridge.<\/p>\n

Rob Stephenson<\/p>\n

A quick scroll through Urban Archive inspired a visit to Lisanti Chapel, a small stone structure on East 215th Street sandwiched between a modern gray apartment building and a plain white fence. He wondered out loud whether the chapel was erected in 1905 in response to a scandal at the nearby Church of Immaculate Conception, where, two years prior, a Catholic priest in serious debt was accused of faking his own kidnapping. (Stephenson was unable to answer the question<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Stephenson says he\u2019s most intrigued by neighborhoods he hasn\u2019t visited before, or areas major news publications don’t often write about. But eventually, he knows he will have to hit them all. Sometimes he bases the decision of where to go off his own schedule; if his daughter happens to have volleyball practice in Bushwick, for instance, he might decide to photograph the neighborhood that afternoon.<\/p>\n

In Williamsbridge.<\/p>\n

Rob Stephenson<\/p>\n

At other times, Stephenson tries to work through a loose rotation of boroughs: Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan \u2014 repeat. Sometimes he skips Staten Island to make sure he doesn\u2019t exhaust its few neighborhoods too early on.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t want to have a total imbalance,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd there\u2019s a danger of doing all the interesting neighborhoods in the beginning and in the end I\u2019m stuck with the Park Slopes. I mean, I love Park Slope. But I\u2019m a little worried about making that interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Williamsbridge.<\/p>\n

Rob Stephenson<\/p>\n

As The Neighborhoods’ subscriber count continues to grow, Stephenson has increasingly heard from readers about places they would like to see documented next. He said a few people have started their own versions of the project. A Canadian is replicating it in Winnipeg. Someone else in Hungary asked Stephenson if it would be OK to do it in Budapest.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course it is,\u201d Stephenson said, laughing. \u201cIt\u2019s not that original of an idea.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For the past three years, Rob Stephenson has been on a mission to photograph every single neighborhood in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":364913,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-364912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364912"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364912\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364913"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}