The district contains all of Lower Manhattan, including Wall Street, and the western Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brooklyn Heights, DUMBO, Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Red Hook, Gowanus, Prospect Heights, Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, and Sunset Park.

This congressional district has changed configurations and locations many times throughout its history due to redistricting, initially starting out as an upstate constituency before gradually moving south.

During this time, it was majority-African American and included the neighborhoods of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Heights, Brownsville, Canarsie, East New York, and Ocean Hill, as well as parts of Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, and Williamsburg.

[5] Demographically, it also had the largest number (197,000 or 270,000) and the highest percentage of Jews (27.5% or 37.6%)[a] of any congressional district,[6] largely as a result of the fact that it included several heavily Jewish neighborhoods of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Prior to the 2020 census, the district stretched from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Borough Park.