neighborhood · official boundary
Downtown
An official neighborhood of Boston, as bounded by the Boston Planning Department — 397 acres. This is the official layer: the boundary an authority drew. What people call this place, and where they say it reaches, are filed separately as attested claims.
The official boundary of Downtown as promulgated by the Boston Planning Department.
Place
official layer
An official boundary, promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it. It is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer.
- Filed by this archive as
- neighborhood
- Authority
- Boston Planning Department
- Within
- Boston
- Area
- 1.61 square kilometers
- Boundary
- held as GeoJSON at
/asset/716a587374844a8dde95e8c00d4362ee/downtown.geojson— 20318 bytes, exactly as accessioned
Map
image/svg+xml at /asset/297a10a328222ad3741506f4a89d9490/downtown.svg — 4214 bytes, SHA-256 297a10a328222ad3… · Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0The exact coordinates are held separately as
/asset/716a587374844a8dde95e8c00d4362ee/downtown.geojson (application/geo+json, 20318 bytes, SHA-256 716a587374844a8d…). The map is simplified for drawing; the boundary is not.Questions this record answers
Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.
Where is Downtown, and what kind of boundary does the archive hold?
Downtown is recorded as a neighborhood, within Boston. The archive holds its boundary on the official layer: promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
Who drew the boundary of Downtown?
Boston Planning Department promulgated it. A boundary with no promulgating authority is an assertion rather than a fact, and this archive files those separately, as claims.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
How large is Downtown?
1.61 square kilometers, computed from the boundary the archive holds and not quoted from elsewhere.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
What does the archive's map of Downtown show?
A static map of the boundary, rendered by the archive on a server and never in a reader's browser, served as image/svg+xml at /asset/297a10a328222ad3741506f4a89d9490/downtown.svg. The exact coordinates it was drawn from are served separately as application/geo+json at /asset/716a587374844a8dde95e8c00d4362ee/downtown.geojson.
Attested by: Rendered by archive-ingest 0.1.0 from the boundary this archive holds; digest 297a10a328222ad3741506f4a89d949033b94a08e8d4a30b777534127e75519b.
What else does the world call Downtown?
The archive reconciles this record to Wikidata (Q14207799); English Wikipedia (Downtown_Boston). Each identity carries the method that produced it, and any candidate the archive did not assert is published in the reconciliation ledger rather than left absent.
Attested by: Q14207799 — Q14207799 — label "Downtown Boston", classed as downtown, neighborhood in Boston, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0. Downtown_Boston — schema:about Q14207799 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipedia, decided 3 September 2026 by archive-ingest 0.1.0
What does the archive hold for Downtown, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of Downtown from Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public domain). 4 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to Boston Planning Department.
Attested by: Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries, retrieved 2 September 2026, under Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0.
This record, elsewhere
Identities the archive asserts, each named with the method that produced it. Candidates the archive did not assert here are held in the reconciliation ledger and are shown below, under candidates the archive declined, and in the reconciliation ledger. Each method is stated in full — the procedure, the value it was compared against, and the date it was decided — in this record's machine rendering.
- Wikidata —
Q14207799Method: label-type-geography (proximity) · Matched against: Q14207799 — label "Downtown Boston", classed as downtown, neighborhood in Boston · 896 m apart · Decided 3 September 2026 - English Wikipedia —
Downtown_BostonMethod: wikidata-sitelink · Matched against: schema:about Q14207799 ; schema:isPartOf en.wikipedia · Decided 3 September 2026
Related records
- located in — Boston
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:downtown
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/place/downtown
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/place/downtown.json
- Version
- 1 · last changed 2 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Boston Planning Department neighborhood boundaries — source of record
- License
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence (PDDL) 1.0 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- 7
- Attribution
- Boston Planning Department
- Rights as stated
- Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the official neighborhood boundaries as GeoJSON from the City of Boston open-data portal | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | reproject | the source is already WGS 84 (EPSG:4326); the geometry was set to that SRID and multi-cast without alteration of coordinates | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | normalize | the feature's name became the record title; the boundary was written to the official layer with the promulgating authority named | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | externalize-boundary | The boundary left the inline page graph and became two preserved holdings: the exact coordinates at /asset/716a587374844a8dde95e8c00d4362ee/downtown.geojson and a static map rendered server-side at /asset/297a10a328222ad3741506f4a89d9490/downtown.svg. The stored geometry is unchanged; the record graph now addresses it instead of carrying it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |