Ridgewood, Queens

Ridgewood's tax-lot file is dominated by age: 90% of recorded buildings predate 1940, and the median building on record dates to 1925. Only 6% of the recorded stock dates from the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom, and just 2% has gone up since 2000 — a small share of recent construction layered onto an overwhelmingly prewar base. The neighborhood borders Maspeth to the north, Glendale to the south, and East Williamsburg, Bushwick (West), and Bushwick (East) across the Brooklyn-Queens border to the west. That 1925 median year is among the earliest recorded in this file, reflecting a neighborhood substantially built out before the modern zoning code existed.

16% of Ridgewood's roughly 8,000 tax lots sit inside a recorded historic district, a real share of the built fabric carrying that designation. Land use splits closely between house-scale and apartment-scale construction: 41% of lots are recorded as one- and two-family use and 40% as multi-family walk-up buildings, with another 12% mixed residential-commercial. Building-class records lean the same way, with walk-up apartment buildings the largest class at 40%, two-family buildings at 35%, and mixed residential-commercial buildings at 10%. That near-even split between one- and two-family and walk-up-apartment use, on lots this old, suggests two building patterns that both took shape in roughly the same early period.

Overall, 93% of Ridgewood's parcels are classed as residential, holding 28,012 recorded units. Lot sizes run small and consistent — a median of 2,363 square feet, with even the largest lots on record reaching only 3,200 square feet — a tight range consistent with a neighborhood built out rowhouse by rowhouse rather than assembled into larger sites. That narrow lot-size spread, paired with the 90% prewar share noted above, describes blocks that reached their current form early and have changed little in the century since.

Heights stay low across the file: a median of 2 stories, with 0% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors. None of Ridgewood's parcels carry a federally mapped flood-zone designation, a fact about the current map rather than the neighborhood's history. Development capacity is more limited here than the age of the stock might suggest: only 64% of lots carry a recorded floor-area cushion above what's currently built, and the median residual sits at 0.3 FAR points per lot — a smaller cushion than in some of the newer-built neighborhoods in this profile, consistent with a block that has already used most of what its low-rise zoning allows. Per-lot zoning and historic-district detail for any parcel here is available in individual property records.