C4-5 Zoning District — New York City

This designation stands out for how much of its recorded ground falls under landmark review: 83% of the roughly 110 lots carrying it sit inside a designated historic district — a substantial share layered directly on top of the zoning itself. That overlap sits alongside genuinely old construction: the median construction year is 1900, predating most of the twentieth century's building booms, and 82% of buildings predate 1940. Only 8% of the recorded stock dates from the 1945-to-1975 boom, and a further 8% has gone up since 2000. That pairing of an old median construction year with a heavy landmark overlay is not a coincidence: buildings old enough to carry architectural or historical significance are exactly the ones most likely to be recorded inside a designated historic district in the first place.

The composition is dominated by mixed residential-commercial buildings, which account for 56% of recorded land use, with commercial-and-office uses adding a further 25%. Among recorded building classes, walk-up apartment buildings make up 25% of the stock and mixed residential-commercial structures 17% more. Residential lots make up 62% of the total, and the file counts 1,858 homes across these roughly 110 lots — a modest total consistent with a small, low-rise designation rather than a dense one. That composition, weighted toward mixed-use rather than purely residential buildings, is consistent with a small commercial corridor sitting inside an otherwise landmarked, low-rise designation.

The lots run a median of 2,668 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 18,555 square feet — a moderate spread for a designation this size. Buildings run to a median height of 4 stories, and 9% of the recorded stock rises above 6 floors. None of these lots sit within the mapped federal flood zone, and the historic-district overlap noted above accounts for the bulk of the preservation-related record on this stock. On ground this constrained by both lot size and landmark review, the recorded height and the modest share of taller buildings read less as a departure from any rule than as a description of what this particular stock has always looked like.

The development ledger shows a comparatively modest gap: 58% of lots record floor area below their allowance, with a median residual of just 0.4 FAR — a small recorded margin on a stock that is already built out and, on most of these lots, subject to landmark review as well. On a stock this old and this heavily landmarked, whatever recorded room for new floor area exists is more likely to surface as an addition or renovation reviewed under landmark rules than as new ground-up construction. Whatever margin an individual parcel here retains is set out, with its citation, on the rules tables above.