M1-4D Zoning District — New York City

This designation's recorded stock is among the oldest and flattest profiled on these pages. Across the roughly 300 tax lots that carry it citywide, 84% of buildings predate 1940 and the median construction year is 1931 — deep prewar territory. Only 3% of the recorded stock has gone up since 2000, one of the thinner recent-construction shares in this comparison set, and just 8% falls inside the 1945-1975 postwar boom. Little here has been touched by more recent building activity; what stands is substantially what was built before the Second World War, still on the ground today. Read against the rest of this batch, that combination of age and quiet recent activity places this designation among the more settled, least-changing ones on record.

The recorded building classes split between housing and industry: two-family homes lead at 19%, walk-up apartment buildings follow at 16%, and factory and industrial buildings add 13% — a mixed working-class and manufacturing fabric rather than a single type. By land use, one- and two-family use leads at 26%, industrial and manufacturing use follows at 22%, and multi-family walk-up use adds 16%, a land-use file that tracks the housing-and-industry split visible in the building-class mix above. 55% of lots are recorded as residential, and the file counts 679 homes on them.

Height stays uniformly low: a median of 2 stories, with 0% of recorded buildings rising above 6 floors — none of the mid-rise or taller stock that shows up in some of the other designations profiled here. Lots themselves run small, a median of 2,521 square feet, with even the largest recorded parcels reaching only 10,018 square feet — tight, modestly scaled ground consistent with the low-rise stock recorded above it. Ground this tight, paired with height this uniform, describes a fabric built to one consistent scale rather than a mix of larger and smaller holdings.

84% of these lots record floor area below their allowance, but the typical gap is thin rather than deep: a median residual of just 0.6 FAR, on parcels already small to begin with. None of the lots, 0%, sit inside the mapped federal flood zone, and none, 0%, carry historic-district status on record — two absences that leave the zoning figures in the rules tables above as the primary constraint on file for this designation.

That combination — an old, low, thin-margin stock sitting on small parcels — is a distinct pattern within this batch, closer to a settled residential-and-industrial corridor than to the taller, newer designations profiled elsewhere here.