Golconda Playground, Brooklyn
In the basketball capital of the world, New Yorkers are rarely more than a few blocks away from a court.
Hundreds of outdoor basketball courts dot the city across the five boroughs' many parks and playgrounds, serving as a meeting and recreational space for generations of residents.
No two courts are identical. From muted neutrals to vibrant tones, their color palettes vary from corner to corner.
Like the city itself, many of New York's basketball courts are shades of gray.
Durable and low-maintenance, asphalt courts blend in with city streets, trading street signs for backboards and crosswalks for three-point lines.
Nearly two-thirds of the surface area on the city's basketball courts is made up of gray tones, according to an analysis of New York City Department of Parks and Recreation data and aerial photography of the city. That figure accounts for more than 1,600 courts across all five boroughs.
Not all colors are muted. In every borough, there are courts where greens, blues, reds and yellows make courts come alive.
Share of basketball court surface colors
Average across all courts in each borough
Blues and greens
Many of the city's courts are flavors of blues and greens.
On Sixth Avenue in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Manhattan, one of the city's most famous basketball spaces is a bold pattern of blue and orange. Known as "The Cage," the West 4th Street courts were renovated in 2015 with support from the New York Knicks, and painted to match the team's colors.
At other parks, like Pier 42 in Manhattan and Arrochar Playground in Staten Island, green courts mirror adjacent turf fields.
Warm tones
Red, orange and yellow shades are less common, but make for striking contrasts against the urban landscape.
At parks like Brooklyn's Stroud Playground, they serve as bold accent tones; at others, they take over the court entirely.
Patchworks of color
Some courts combine the full spectrum of colors in a single design.
Artworks at St. Nicholas Park, Marconi Park and Murray Playground are among the colorful murals developed by Project Backboard, a nonprofit that renovates public basketball courts.
The source material from this analysis comes from facility-level data provided by the New York City Parks Department and aerial photography of all five boroughs published by New York State. Using the geographic coordinates of every single basketball court in the city, the analysis clipped images of each court. It then ran a color-identification algorithm over every photo to extract the colors visible in each court.
The city's courts
Every group of basketball courts in New York City, arranged by dominant color
Because city parks with multiple courts typically organize them close to one another, images of courts in this project are presented as "complexes." Many courts in the same complex share visual characteristics; some are very distinct from one another. Larger parks, like Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx and Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, often contain multiple complexes of courts that serve different neighborhoods.
Because the source imagery for this project is real-world aerial photography, the color extraction and image presentation in this analysis is subject to a number of challenges. Some courts were under construction at the time the images were taken, in 2024; others are covered by highways or shadows from neighboring buildings, which can cast courts in a dark blue hue regardless of how bright their surfaces truly are.
This analysis took steps to mitigate the impact of these real-world challenges, such as removing the courts with the most significant shadow coverage from the borough-level palette analysis, but some imperfect image clippings remain in the source material.
Find your park
Search for courts and colors at your local New York City park