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Inside a photographer's journey to visit every neighborhood in New York City
By
Sonia Rao
Published Oct 5, 2026
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Rob Stephenson
By
Sonia Rao
Published Oct 5, 2026
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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 — along with archival images and written research about the community — to a Substack newsletter called The Neighborhoods.
The photographer, who grew up in Connecticut and currently lives in Brooklyn, started “The Neighborhoods” 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 “really just an excuse to break it into chunks so it’s more manageable, you know?” he said.
In Williamsbridge.
Rob Stephenson
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’s neighborhoods — which the New York Times published three years ago — as a North Star, given how arbitrary these borders can feel.
I met up with Stephenson a couple weeks ago in Williamsbridge, an area of the Bronx off Gun Hill Road. As we climbed up and down the neighborhood’s 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.
In Williamsbridge.
Rob Stephenson
He hasn’t been able to stop seeing stainless steel fences after belatedly reading an article 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.
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: “I 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,” he said. “And then a few neighborhoods over, they had [Old] El Paso cans. This is a big Jamaican neighborhood, so maybe I’ll find some cans to support my theory.”
In Williamsbridge.
Rob Stephenson
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 “my MFA.” The experience shaped his work ethic.
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.
In Williamsbridge.
Rob Stephenson
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.)
Stephenson says he’s most intrigued by neighborhoods he hasn’t 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.
In Williamsbridge.
Rob Stephenson
At other times, Stephenson tries to work through a loose rotation of boroughs: Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan — repeat. Sometimes he skips Staten Island to make sure he doesn’t exhaust its few neighborhoods too early on.
“I don’t want to have a total imbalance,” he said. “And there’s a danger of doing all the interesting neighborhoods in the beginning and in the end I’m stuck with the Park Slopes. I mean, I love Park Slope. But I’m a little worried about making that interesting.”
In Williamsbridge.
Rob Stephenson
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.
“Of course it is,” Stephenson said, laughing. “It’s not that original of an idea.”
Tagged
Existing in New York City
the bronx
Sonia Rao
Sonia Rao is a culture reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. She previously covered entertainment and breaking news at The Washington Post. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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