C4-2A Zoning District — New York City

The construction record for this designation runs old and quiet. Of the roughly 880 lots mapped this way, 87% of recorded buildings predate 1940 and the median construction year sits at 1927 — deep in the same pre-Depression window that produced most of the surrounding blocks. The 1945-to-1975 boom barely touched this stock, contributing only 6% of recorded buildings, and construction since 2000 has added just 3% more. What that leaves is a building record that was substantially finished before the current zoning even existed, with only a thin, steady trickle of newer buildings filling in afterward rather than any wave of postwar or contemporary replacement.

The recorded mix leans commercial in its land use even though the buildings themselves skew residential in use: mixed residential-commercial buildings account for 58% of recorded land use, commercial-and-office uses add 29%, and multi-family walk-up buildings contribute a further 3%. Among recorded building classes, mixed residential-commercial structures make up 36% of the stock and walk-up apartment buildings another 8%. Despite the commercial land-use label attached to most parcels, 64% of lots are recorded as residential, and the file counts 4,879 homes across this designation — density carried by mixed-use buildings rather than by dedicated apartment towers. Spread across roughly 880 lots, that works out to several recorded homes on a typical parcel rather than a single unit, consistent with small multi-family buildings layered over ground-floor commercial space.

The lots themselves run small and consistent: a median of 2,200 square feet, with even the 90th percentile reaching only 9,719 square feet. Buildings on them are similarly modest — a median height of 3 stories, and 0% of the recorded stock rises above 6 floors. None of these lots are recorded inside a designated historic district, and only 4% sit within the mapped federal flood zone. It is a stock built low and close to the ground, on parcels too narrow individually to have supported much taller construction regardless of what any given builder might have attempted.

The development ledger shows real recorded slack: 87% of lots carry floor area below their allowance, with a median residual of 1.1 FAR — a meaningful gap given how uniformly old the stock above it is. That combination, old buildings sitting well under their recorded capacity, is common on corridors that filled in early and have not been rebuilt since. None of these lots carry a recorded flood designation beyond the 4% noted above, and none sit inside a historic district, so whatever unbuilt capacity these records show is not complicated by either overlay. The specific allowance and every citation behind it are on the rules tables above; each lot's own page carries its individual recorded figures.