Manhattanville-West Harlem, Manhattan

Manhattanville-West Harlem is the smallest neighborhood profiled in this stretch of Manhattan by recorded tax-lot count: roughly 410 parcels, carrying 8,648 housing units in total. No historic district designation appears on record here — a 0% share, the lowest among the neighboring files — and residential use covers 66% of lots, also the lowest residential share recorded nearby. That combination of small scale and no recorded historic protection describes a neighborhood whose tax-lot file looks meaningfully different from several of its larger, more protected neighbors.

The building-class file is dominated by walk-up apartment buildings at 47%, with elevator-apartment buildings at 13% and a further 7% recorded under a vacant land classification — a share of vacant land that doesn't appear at meaningful levels in several neighboring files, such as Hamilton Heights-Sugar Hill or Morningside Heights. Land-use coding shows a similar pattern: 38% of lots coded multi-family walk-up, 15% mixed residential-and-commercial, and 10% multi-family elevator. The presence of a measurable vacant-land share alongside a majority walk-up building stock suggests a file still recording some unbuilt parcels, rather than one that reached its current built-out state long ago.

Age records show 84% of buildings predating 1940, with a median construction year of 1910, and 5% of the stock built since 2000 — alongside 7% inside the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom window. Height records show a median building of 5 stories, with only 7% rising above 6 stories, among the lower elevator-building shares recorded in upper Manhattan. That age profile — heavily prewar, with only a modest recent-construction share — sits alongside the neighborhood's larger median lot size, a combination that points to bigger, older parcels rather than a dense grid of small rowhouse lots.

Development records show 72% of lots carrying unused floor-area capacity, with a median residual of 0.7 FAR points across the neighborhood. Flood mapping places 4% of lots inside the federally mapped floodplain, a figure describing the current regulatory map rather than a claim about water history at any address. Lot sizes run to a median of 4,640 square feet, notably larger at the median than several adjacent files, with the largest recorded lots reaching 24,191 square feet — a lot-size pattern that stands out given how few of the neighborhood's parcels are protected by historic-district rules. Taken together, the small overall scale, the absence of historic-district coverage, and the recorded vacant-land share describe a neighborhood with more visible room for change on record than several of its immediate neighbors.