Murray Hill-Kips Bay, Manhattan

Murray Hill-Kips Bay's building-age record holds an unusual reversal: more of the recorded stock dates from the 1945-to-1975 postwar-boom years, 12%, than from anything built since 2000, just 4%. The bulk of the neighborhood is still older than either figure — a median construction year of 1920, with 77% of buildings predating 1940. Together those numbers describe a neighborhood whose most recent visible wave of change came decades ago, not in the past few years, with the 1920 median tying the whole file to an earlier building era than the 1945-to-1975 boom itself.

Land-use codes lean toward mixed residential-and-commercial use at 35% of the roughly 1,200 tax lots, with 19% recorded as plain multi-family walk-up use and 15% as multi-family elevator use. Building-class records show 28% of structures as walk-up apartment buildings, 20% as elevator apartment buildings, and 13% under a separate classification. 77% of lots carry a residential designation, and those lots hold 47,401 housing units on a median lot size of 2,469 square feet — a rowhouse-scale median carrying a large recorded unit count, consistent with the elevator- and walk-up-apartment classes above rather than a stock of single-family houses.

Height runs to a median of 5 stories, with 26% of buildings rising above 6 floors, a wider high-rise share than the mostly low-rise blocks the median alone implies. 10% of lots sit inside a mapped historic district, a designation that runs alongside, not in place of, the neighborhood's zoning rules. Flood mapping reaches 3% of lots — a record of the current federal map, not a claim about the rest of the neighborhood's exposure to water.

Development records show 71% of lots carrying recorded floor area below their zoning allowance, with a median residual of 1.5 in floor-area ratio still available on file, a wider margin than the neighborhood's thin recent-construction share might suggest. Lot sizes cluster around that 2,469-square-foot median, with the upper end of the range reaching 16,876 square feet. The neighborhood borders East Midtown-Turtle Bay and Midtown-Times Square to the north, Gramercy and Midtown South-Flatiron-Union Square to the west, Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village nearby, and reaches across the river to Greenpoint and Long Island City-Hunters Point — a wide enough ring of neighbors that its own recorded mix sits between the office-heavy blocks to its north and the more residential ones to its south.