Battery Park City is bounded on the east by West Street, which insulates the area from the Financial District of downtown Manhattan. To the west, north and south, the area is surrounded by the tidal estuary of the Hudson River.

The development consists of roughly five major sections. Traveling North to South, the first neighborhood, the "North Residential Neighborhood," consists of high-rise residential buildings, a large hotel, Stuyvesant High School and a mall (currently occupied by a movie theater, restaurants and a discount store for leather goods and accessories). Former parkland in the area is being converted into high-rise buildings.

Immediately to the South lies the World Financial Center, a complex of several commercial buildings occupied by tenants including American Express, Dow Jones & Company, Merrill Lynch and Deloitte & Touch. The World Financial Center's ground floor and portions of the second floor are occupied by a mall; its center point is a steel-and-glass atrium known as the Winter Garden. Outside of the Winter Garden lies a sizeable yacht harbor on the Hudson known as North Cove.

South of the World Financial Center lies the majority of Battery Park City's residential areas, in three sections: "Gateway Plaza", a high-rise building complex; the "Rector Place Residential Neighborhood" and the "Battery Place Residential Neighborhood", mostly low-rise building complexes. These neighborhoods contain most of the area's residential buildings, along with park space and various types of supporting businesses (supermarkets, restaurants, movie theatres.) Construction of residential buildings began north of the World Financial Center in the late 1990s.