Where can you see the Empire State Building?

#30DayMapChallenge 2026 - Day 5: Sight

Where at street level can you see the Empire State Building? Each colored area is a place where, standing on the sidewalk (1.7 m eye height), some part of the ESB is in direct line of sight. Color shows how much of the 443 m building you see: pale yellow is almost all of it, deep purple only the mast or antenna tip.

Data sources

• Building footprints and heights: OpenStreetMap via the Protomaps daily basemap build (z15 vector tiles, Nov 4 2026). About 11% of buildings have no height and get 10 m.
• Terrain: USGS 3DEP bare-earth lidar elevation, resampled to 2 m.

Method

1. Combine terrain and building heights into a 2 m surface model (UTM 18N) covering ~21 × 21 km around the ESB. The ESB's own footprint is removed so points on its centerline can be targeted.
2. Cast rays outward from the ESB centerline to every edge cell of the grid at 90 heights (every 5 m from street level to the 443.2 m tip), accounting for Earth curvature and atmospheric refraction. For every open, non-water cell this gives the lowest point on the ESB visible from eye height. Sightlines are symmetric, so this is what a person standing there would see.
3. Bridges: footprints a street passes beneath (bridge approaches, viaducts) are modelled as floating decks you can see under. The Manhattan Bridge's Brooklyn tower is hand-modelled with an opening between its legs (pier ~10 m to deck ~40 m — estimated, not measured).
4. Results are banded every 50 m of ESB height and grouped into one multipolygon per band. For this web map, areas under 400 m² were dropped and edges simplified (~5 m), so narrow slivers and some side streets are missing.

Not modelled: trees, bridge decks over water, elevated trains, scaffolding and signs, or rooftop/indoor views. Results are only as good as the OSM building heights.

Analysis assembled by Claude Code (Anthropic)