Harlem (South), Manhattan

Harlem (South)'s tax-lot file pairs old bones with newer additions: the median recorded construction year is 1901, one of the earliest in this part of Manhattan, while 8% of buildings date to 2000 or later — a recent-construction share tied for the highest among the neighborhoods covered here. Overall, 86% of buildings predate 1940, and just 2% fall inside the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom. That pairing of an early median construction year with a comparatively high recent-construction share suggests infill development has continued in a neighborhood whose core fabric is otherwise quite old.

Land-use coding shows multi-family walk-up buildings as the dominant category by a wide margin — 47% of the neighborhood's roughly 1,900 lots, the largest such share recorded in this part of Manhattan — with mixed residential-and-commercial at 15% and one- and two-family land use also at 15%. Building-class records confirm the walk-up character: 51% of lots carry that classification, with two-family buildings at 11% and elevator-apartment buildings at 9%, a mix that leans further toward walk-up construction than neighboring Harlem (North) or Morningside Heights. That land-use concentration, combined with the neighborhood's overall scale of roughly 1,900 tax lots, describes one of the more uniformly walk-up-coded files among the neighborhoods covered here.

Height records show a median building of 4 stories, with just 8% of the recorded stock rising above 6 stories. A historic district designation covers 27% of lots. Lot sizes run to a median of 2,018 square feet, with the largest recorded lots reaching 9,142 square feet — a fine-grained parcel pattern typical of the rowhouse-and-tenement blocks this part of Manhattan is built from. The historic-district figure sits in the middle of the range recorded across nearby neighborhoods, protecting a meaningful minority of parcels without covering the file as a whole.

Development records show 75% of lots carrying unused floor-area capacity, with a median residual of 1.1 FAR points across the neighborhood. None of Harlem (South)'s recorded tax lots sit inside the federally mapped floodplain, a 0% share describing the current flood map rather than a claim about any specific address, water history, or drainage conditions at any single parcel. Residential use covers 87% of lots, and the file counts 24,537 housing units across the neighborhood's roughly 1,900 parcels. Taken together, the age, land-use, and development figures describe a neighborhood built primarily as dense, low-rise walk-up housing, with a modest but real recorded cushion for additional floor area under current rules.