Brooklyn
The wesern end of Long Island holds the Big Apple's most thickly populated borough, and one of its most ethnically diverse. Coney Island is a central point for occult activity, particularly on the sites of old, closed amusement parks.
Manhattan
Manhattan is about as densely populated a place as you'll find in the United States. The borough is a center of finance, culture and more, thickly packed with people all working toward success. While all the boroughs bear a share of the city's character, Manhattan is probably what most outsiders think of first when they think of New York City - the skyline is full of skyscrapers, iconic locations like Wall Street, Central Park, Grand Central Terminal, Liberty Island, and more.
Even some of its neighborhoods are more widely recognized that the actual capital cities of other states - Harlem, Greenwich Village, East Village, SoHo, the Bowery, and more. Fifth Avenue divides Manhattan between east and west. And it pulses with supernatural activity. A lot of that activity is centered around New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Queens
The borough of Queens shares Long Island with Brooklyn. Both John F. Kenedy Airport and La Guardia Airport were established in the borough, making it a heavy travel hub. Queens has a long history of jazz. Queens is also very ethnically diverse. Queens is the only vehicular access point to Rikers Island, though the island itself is technically part of the Bronx. The Francis Bruno Bridge is a potential hotspot for the dead, as ghosts seem to have an easier time crossing water at a bridge. A long history of violence on the island(almost more penal colony than prison) has engendered more than a few hungry ghosts.
Queens has a great many cemeteries; the interred dead outnumber the living by approximately three to one. In 1852, New York City enacted a law prohibiting burials in Manhattan. The result was an estimated 35,000 corpses disinterred and moved to Western Queens, to the Cypress Hills Cemetery(which serves both Brooklyn and Queens). The neighborhood of Glendale was almost entirely encircled by cemeteries at this time, and the area became known as the Cemetery Belt. Many notable figures are buried here, for example Harry Houdini's grave in Machpelah Cemetery.
Staten Island
The southwestern borough of the city, Staten Island is also the least populated. It’s partly urban and partly suburban in makeup, connected to Brooklyn via the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. The island features a number of parks and beaches, and a 260-acre wildlife preserve. The borough has a very high concentration of Italian-Americans. One of the more notorious places in Staten Island is the Kreischer Mansion, a haunted house with a grisly past.
The house was long rumored to be haunted by the ghosts of members of the Kreischer family; even when converted into a restaurant in 1996, employees claimed to hear slamming doors and voices arguing when nobody was around. But more recently, it was discovered that a grisly murder had taken place there in 1995, the victim dismembered and burned in the furnace.
The World Underground
New York doesn’t quite have the immense sewers that you see in a movie or cartoon, but there’s a lot of underground to be seen there. The sandhogs — the construction workers who dig tunnels — have carved out subways and sewers, water tunnels, traffic tunnels, even secret command bunkers. And not all of those tunnels are regularly patrolled. One such tunnel runs under the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. Designed for private use, it once carried President Franklin Delano Roosevelt underground to and from Hyde Park — part of an effort to avoid having the polio-stricken statesman’s physical difficulties and movements filmed.
The private track fell into disuse long ago, but now it serves as one of many, many empty passages littering the New York underground. Moving around in the disused tunnels below the city isn’t completely easy, of course; the city is bound to monitor access to such dangerous passages. The world being what it is, though, security is often lax. However, the tunnels aren’t always safe. Old collapsed tunnels are haunted by the ghosts of sandhogs who died there — ghosts that are themselves old and strong. And whatever other monsters exist in the World of Darkness, they too may look on these secret tunnels as ideal territory.
Map of New York City