C4-5A Zoning District — New York City

This designation carries a real share of taller buildings for its size: 23% of recorded buildings rise above 6 floors, even though the median building height across the roughly 55 lots is just 4 stories — a split between a low-rise majority and a meaningful cluster of taller structures. That kind of spread, height concentrated in a minority of buildings rather than distributed evenly, tends to show up where larger buildings sit among smaller ones on a shared designation rather than a uniform block type. That split — most buildings low, a real minority genuinely tall — reads differently than a designation where every recorded building sits close to the same height.

The building stock is old: 91% of recorded buildings predate 1940, and the median construction year is 1910. The 1945-to-1975 boom contributed just 4% of the stock, and construction since 2000 has added only 2% more — together a very light rate of new building layered onto a base put up more than a century ago. Little has changed on these lots since; what stands is largely what was built in the district's earliest years. That leaves a stock where the passage of more than a century has added comparatively little new construction, layering only a thin recent share on top of what was largely already standing generations ago.

By land use, mixed residential-commercial buildings lead at 27%, commercial-and-office uses add 20%, and one- and two-family buildings contribute a further 18%. Among recorded building classes, walk-up apartment buildings make up 25% of the stock, office buildings 15%, and two-family homes 13% — a real office presence for a designation this size. Residential lots make up 69% of the total, and the file counts 640 homes across these roughly 55 lots. That office share, while modest in absolute terms, stands out for a designation this size, where recorded building classes elsewhere often lean almost entirely residential or mixed-use.

The lots run a median of 2,057 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 9,871 square feet. None of these lots sit inside a designated historic district or the mapped federal flood zone. The development ledger shows real recorded slack: 71% of lots record floor area below their allowance, with a median residual of 1.2 FAR. With neither overlay recorded here to complicate matters, the room this ledger shows is not layered under any additional review. Whatever a specific lot retains is set out, with its citation, on the rules tables above.