Westerleigh-Castleton Corners, Staten Island

Nearly half of Westerleigh-Castleton Corners' recorded building stock, 48%, dates from the 1945-to-1975 postwar boom, comfortably the largest of its three broad construction-era shares — well ahead of the 31% recorded before 1940 and the 6% recorded since 2000. Few of the other neighborhoods in this file show a single era claiming so much of the recorded stock. That single-era concentration is one of the more pronounced construction patterns recorded among the neighborhoods gathered here. That pattern describes a neighborhood whose built environment took shape overwhelmingly in one mid-century stretch, rather than growing steadily across the decades the way some of its neighbors did. The median recorded building year is 1955, squarely inside that boom window.

By lot count, this is the largest file in the group: roughly 9,200 tax lots, more than any other neighborhood covered here. Development headroom is correspondingly wide — 89% of lots carry recorded floor-area capacity below their zoning allowance, the highest share in this set, with a median residual FAR gap of 0.3. That much headroom, spread over that many lots, makes the neighborhood one of the more land-banked files in this particular corner of the borough, at least on paper. Even accounting for the scale of the lot count, a headroom share this wide suggests most of the neighborhood's construction has yet to reach what its zoning currently allows.

One-family houses lead the building-class file at 67%, two-family buildings add 24%, and a small vacant-land share of 2% rounds out the top three. Land use runs 91% one- and two-family residential, with 2% commercial-and-office use and 2% vacant. Flood exposure is minor — just 1% of lots sit inside a mapped special flood hazard area. Lot sizes run a median of 4,000 square feet, topping out at 6,300 square feet among the larger recorded lots, a tighter spread than in some larger-lot neighborhoods nearby. That combination of low flood exposure and a tight lot-size spread describes a neighborhood shaped more by its zoning history than by any particular geographic constraint.

Residential use covers 94% of lots here, the largest residential concentration recorded in this group, and the file counts 12,536 units. Five neighboring files border this one: Mariner's Harbor-Arlington-Graniteville, New Springville-Willowbrook-Bulls Head-Travis, Port Richmond, Todt Hill-Emerson Hill-Lighthouse Hill-Manor Heights, and West New Brighton-Silver Lake-Grymes Hill, several of which are recorded with a noticeably different construction-era mix than the boom-heavy profile recorded here. Reading those files side by side traces how construction timing shifts across the borough's central spine.