From Which U.S. City Can You Travel North, South, East, or West and End up in the Same State?

Caitlin Dempsey

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Map showing how traveling due north, south, east, or west from Stamford, Connecticut results in travel that passes through the state of New York with a large red question mark over the map to obscure the name.

Can you answer this geography riddle?  From which United States city can you travel due north, south, east, or west and still enter the same bordering state?  There is only one city in the US that has this geographic quirk.

The city you can travel north, south, east, or west and enter the same state is..

The answer to this geography trivia question is: Stamford, Connecticut.

Stamford is a East Coast city located in the southwestern point of Connecticut and is the largest city by area in the state.  The southern end of Stamford ends at the Long Island Sound, a tidal estuary of the Atlantic Ocean.  This estuary separates the southern tip of Connecticut from Long Island a peninsula that is part of the state of New York.

The geographic location of Long Island is such that it angles up at the eastern end, making the tip of it farther north than Stamford so that if a person were to travel due east from Stamford across the estuary, they would eventually enter New York via this tip.  

The main portion of the state of New York lies directly east and north of Stamford.





Map showing how traveling due north, south, east, or west from Stamford, Connecticut results in travel that passes through the state of New York.
Map showing how traveling due north, south, east, or west from Stamford, Connecticut results in travel that passes through the state of New York.

More Facts About Stamford

Stamford is  52.09 square miles (134.9 km2) in area, making it the largest city by area in Connecticut.

With nine Fortune 500 companies headquartered here and other major financial institutions, Stamford is the largest financial district in the New York metropolitan region outside of New York City.

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Caitlin Dempsey

Caitlin Dempsey is a geographer, writer, and founder and editor of Geography Realm. She holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Geography from UCLA and a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) from San José State University.

For more than two decades, she has written about geography, maps, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, satellite imagery, and environmental science. Her work focuses on making geography accessible to a broad audience through articles, tutorials, and educational resources.

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