LOOK UP NEIGHBORHOOD AIR QUALITY, ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS

Generating an air quality report about your own neighborhood is easy: simply click here, choose a topic from the drop down menu (for example, "Asthma and the Environment" or "Outdoor Air and Health"), then input your zip code or click your neighborhood on the map -- that's it, a report will pop up. I definitely recommend creating an “Outdoor Air” report: it’ll include a breakdown of specific air pollutants (definitions here), estimated rates of related hospitalizations, and you'll see how your neighborhood stacks up to the rest of your borough, and to NYC in total. Example: I chose "Outdoor Air," then chose my neighborhood, and like magic, this thorough (and horrifying) neighborhood report popped up. Brief excerpt below:

Data for these neighborhood reports come from New York City's Department of Health & Mental Hygiene's "Environment & Health Portal," which in fact contains a variety of data (not just data pertaining to air quality). To generally explore portal data: simply go to the portal homepage, click "Environmental Data" (the green box), or the "Health, Behavior, and Population Data" (the blue box) -- and just start looking around. Here's a short, very straightforward tutorial about exploring exploring portal data. You can also do keyword searches for environmental/health topics of particular interest: for example,  "asthma," "pesticides," etc.