Pelham Gardens, The Bronx

The Bronx neighborhood's tax-lot file skews toward one specific era: 55% of recorded buildings went up during the postwar boom between 1945 and 1975, and the median structure dates to 1950. Only 21% of the stock predates 1940, and just 5% has been built since 2000, so Pelham Gardens reads less like a prewar holdover than a mid-century subdivision that changed only at the margins after it was finished. The pattern holds across the neighborhood's roughly 5,200 tax lots closely enough that it shapes almost everything else the file records — the building classes, the lot geometry, and the height profile all point back to the same construction window rather than to a series of later additions.

That subdivision character shows up in the building classes on record: 44% of lots carry a one-family classification and 42% carry a two-family classification, together accounting for most of the neighborhood's parcels, with only a small remainder recorded under other classes. Land-use coding tells a similar story from a different angle — 87% of lots are coded for one- and two-family use, with another 7% coded multi-family walk-up and 2% recorded as vacant. Lots run to a median of 2,500 square feet, with a lot at the ninetieth percentile reaching 5,000 square feet, a narrow spread that suggests a subdivision platted to a fairly consistent module rather than one mixing large and small parcels. Buildings top out at a median of 2 stories, keeping the street-level scale low and even across the neighborhood.

Development headroom is unusually wide here: the median lot carries 0.3 additional FAR of unused capacity, and 78% of lots have some recorded headroom against their district's allowance under the low-rise districts that cover most of the area. None of that capacity has produced towers — not a single lot is recorded reaching above 6 stories, so whatever room exists on paper has gone largely unbuilt. The flood maps show 0% of lots in the mapped high-risk floodplain, a statement about the current federal flood designation rather than a guarantee against water, and no lots carry a historic-district designation, meaning landmark review does not factor into what can be built or altered here.

Bordering Allerton, Morris Park, Eastchester-Edenwald-Baychester, Co-op City, and Williamsbridge-Olinville, Pelham Gardens sits in one of the borough's quieter development corridors, a fact borne out by the residual-FAR and height figures above as much as by its neighbor list. Residential use dominates the land-use file at 95% of lots, holding a recorded 9,460 housing units across the roughly 5,200 parcels — a ratio consistent with a rowhouse-and-semidetached fabric rather than dense multifamily construction. Per-lot detail behind these figures, down to individual building class and residual FAR, is available through PearlAudit's records lookup for any address in the neighborhood, letting an owner or prospective buyer check a specific parcel against the neighborhood-wide pattern described here.