C4-4A Zoning District — New York City

This designation's construction record is old: the median year built is 1920, and 86% of buildings predate 1940. The 1945-to-1975 boom barely registers here, at just 4% of the stock, and construction since 2000 has added a further 7%. That leaves a building record substantially finished a full century ago, with only light additions since — an early, settled pattern rather than one still filling in. Unlike designations where construction continued steadily across the twentieth century, this one shows a record that was substantially finished early and has changed only modestly since, with most of what stands today dating from before the current zoning code existed at all.

The composition leans heavily mixed-use: mixed residential-commercial buildings account for 58% of recorded land use, commercial-and-office uses add 24%, and multi-family walk-up buildings contribute a further 8%. Among recorded building classes, walk-up apartment buildings make up 25% of the stock and mixed residential-commercial structures 21% more. Residential lots make up 70% of the total, and the file counts 11,479 homes across roughly 1,100 lots — a high number of homes relative to the lot count, consistent with sizable multi-unit buildings rather than small structures. That density is notable given how early most of this stock was built: buildings recorded a century ago are still carrying a meaningful share of the designation's total housing count, rather than having been superseded by later, larger construction.

The lots run a median of 2,285 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 9,200 square feet — a fairly tight, consistent spread. Buildings run to a median height of 3 stories, and 6% of the recorded stock rises above 6 floors. Just 1% of lots sit inside a designated historic district, and none are recorded inside the mapped federal flood zone. That tight lot fabric, combined with a fairly uniform 3-story median height, describes a designation where most parcels look similar to their neighbors rather than varying widely in scale.

The development ledger shows real recorded slack on an old stock: 75% of lots record floor area below their allowance, with a median residual of 1.6 FAR — meaningful room given how early most of these buildings went up. Because so much of this stock predates the current zoning entirely, much of that recorded gap likely reflects buildings that were never expanded to match today's allowances rather than deliberate underbuilding. What any one parcel could still add is a matter for the rules tables above, cited there lot by lot.