Methodology and sources

Everything on this site is computed from public data each night, or written by us from official sources linked on the page. Here is what each number means, where it comes from, under what terms, and how we checked it.

Sources and licences

As the NYC Open Data Law asks, the version of each city dataset is the one published on the date in the last column, and our modifications are described below: we filter, count and aggregate records; we never edit them. Facts on the events, safety and night-views pages come from the official pages linked beside them, checked on 2026-10-29.

Licensed night spots

From the State Liquor Authority’s list of active licences we keep on-premises licences only, and group them by the SLA’s class: bars, lounges & taverns are the SLA’s “Food & Beverage Business” liquor class (0370; a random sample of names in this class is almost all bars and lounges), cafés & eateries are its beer- and wine-only versions, restaurants are restaurant licences of any strength, cabarets are class 0417. “Night spots” = bars + restaurants + cabarets. Groceries, liquor stores, wholesalers and makers are left out, and so are “additional bar” licences, which are a second bar inside a venue already counted.

Each licence is placed by its published coordinates in a 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Area (the city planning department’s neighborhood units). 12,288 of 12,472 on-premises licences had usable coordinates. Density is per km² of the area’s land and water as drawn by City Planning. A licence says a business may serve alcohol; it does not say it is open, or open late.

Loud-music complaints

311 requests of type “Noise – Commercial” with descriptor “Loud Music/Party”, the category residents use for bars, clubs and other businesses, over the last 12 months, placed by their coordinates. Heatmaps count them by the evening they belong to: a 2 a.m. Sunday complaint is part of Saturday night. Complaints measure friction between nightlife and neighbors, not crowd size.

Subway after midnight

From the MTA’s subway GTFS (“20261028-fall-2026-pick-with-long-term-supplements”) we take every scheduled departure from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. for four kinds of night (Monday–Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday), joining the evening’s timetable with the next morning’s. A line “runs overnight” if it has departures between 1 and 5 a.m. on weeknights. The typical wait is the median gap between departures, 1–5 a.m., at the station where that line runs most often overnight; the station lookup shows every departure at your station. 496 stations, 27 services. The base schedule doesn’t include planned work; we tried to compute this week’s planned overnight changes from MTA’s supplemented feed and dropped it because the two feeds were on different timetable picks and the comparison produced false “no service” results.

Last trains

From the LIRR and Metro-North GTFS, for each of the next 14 nights: every train leaving Penn Station, Grand Central Madison or Atlantic Terminal (LIRR) or Grand Central or Harlem–125 St (Metro-North) between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. (later departures are the first morning trains), and the stations it reaches. For the LIRR we also join trains that terminate at Jamaica to trains leaving Jamaica at least 3 minutes later, because many late-night journeys change there. The last train to a station is the latest departure from each terminal that reaches it.

Sun, moon and Manhattanhenge

Sun times use NOAA’s solar position equations for City Hall (40.7128° N, 74.0060° W) with standard refraction; golden hour starts at +6° solar altitude, blue hour runs from −4° to −6°, astronomical dusk is −18°. Moon phases use the main terms of Meeus’s lunar theory. Manhattanhenge is the evening on which the sun’s azimuth equals the grid bearing of 299° at the moment its disc meets a horizon at 0° geometric altitude (the New Jersey skyline at the end of the street, about 0.6° above the sea horizon).

Validation

Sunset and civil dusk vs the US Naval Observatory

USNO rounds to the minute; ours are shown truncated. Includes both 2026 daylight-saving switch days, the solstices and the earliest-sunset week. Checked 2026-11-01. Largest difference: 0.4 min.

Moon phases vs USNO

All 50 new, first-quarter, full and last-quarter moons of 2026: median difference 15 minutes, largest 50 minutes. We show phases to the minute but treat them as good to the hour.

Manhattanhenge vs AMNH

The May dates match exactly; July comes out up to two days late, which is why the forecast is labelled a window and AMNH’s own times take precedence when published.

Subway: our overnight flag vs MTA’s route descriptions

The GTFS feed carries MTA’s own text description of each route (“at all times”, “daily from about 6 AM to 11 PM”…). Our computed overnight flag agrees with it for 24 of 24 routes with a clear description. 90% of route-directions show a median overnight gap of 18–21 minutes: overnight, most of the system runs on a 20-minute rhythm.

Licence locations

40 located licences (0.33%) fall in a different borough from the county on the licence. In the samples we checked, the licence’s ZIP code agreed with the location, not the county, so we keep the location.

What we don’t do

We don’t review, rate or list individual bars and clubs; the only business-level fact we use is that a licence exists. We don’t invent opening hours, events or dates: when an organiser hasn’t published one, we say so. Photos are chosen by hand from Wikimedia Commons and credited on the page.