Hollis, Queens

Hollis's tax-lot records describe a neighborhood that was substantially built out before most of its neighbors even began serious construction. Fully 82% of recorded buildings predate 1940, and the median building on record dates to 1925 — the earliest median construction year among the neighborhoods profiled in this section of Queens. Only 8% of the stock was built during the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom that filled in so much of the surrounding area, and just 5% dates from 2000 or later. That leaves relatively little room in the file for anything built since — a construction history concentrated overwhelmingly in a single early era rather than spread across the several waves recorded in some neighboring profiles.

One-family homes account for 61% of recorded building classifications, two-family homes 25%, and mixed residential-and-commercial buildings 4%. Land-use records lean heavily residential: 86% of lots classified as one- and two-family use, with 5% recorded for mixed residential and commercial purposes and 4% multi-family walk-up use. Building heights run to a median of 2.5 stories, the tallest median in this group of neighborhoods, though no recorded structure in Hollis exceeds 6 stories — that combination of one- and two-family use with a slightly taller median height suggests fuller two-and-a-half-story houses rather than the flatter two-story pattern common elsewhere in this cluster.

Lots in Hollis run to a median of 3,200 square feet, with larger lots reaching up to 6,000 square feet — among the larger lot ceilings in the cluster, wide enough to set the neighborhood apart from some of its tighter-lotted neighbors. Residential use covers 95% of lots, and the roughly 4,200 parcels carry 7,885 housing units on record, a lower unit count than several denser neighbors despite a broadly comparable parcel count. That gap between unit count and parcel count, set against the larger lot ceiling, points toward a neighborhood of fuller, more spread-out houses rather than one built up as densely as its scale alone might suggest.

Recorded floor area sits below the current district allowance on 89% of Hollis lots, at a median residual of 0.3 FAR. No lots are recorded inside a mapped floodplain or a designated historic district here — 0% on both counts, readings of the current maps rather than claims about the land's history.

Hollis borders Jamaica, Jamaica Estates-Holliswood, Queens Village, and St. Albans, each carrying its own distinct age profile in the records. Of that ring, Queens Village alone approaches Hollis's prewar concentration; the other two neighbors both carry a noticeably younger recorded stock.