M1-8A/R11 Zoning District — New York City

This designation carries the largest footprint of any profiled in this batch: roughly 200 tax lots citywide. What stands on that ground is old by construction date but tall by recorded height — an unusual pairing. The median construction year is 1911, and 89% of recorded buildings predate 1940, among the deeper prewar concentrations in this batch, yet the median building height is 9 stories, with 63% of the recorded stock rising above 6 floors. Prewar dates and real height are not always paired this closely elsewhere in the file, where age and height more often move in the same direction — a stock built old and built up at the same time, rather than aging into height through later additions.

Office buildings lead the recorded classes at 44%, elevator apartment buildings follow at 16%, and hotels add 11% — a mix that reads as dense, vertical, and mixed-use rather than uniformly residential or uniformly commercial. Land use tracks closely: commercial-and-office use covers 59% of lots, mixed residential-and-commercial use another 21%, and multi-family elevator use 13%. Even with that commercial lean, 36% of lots are coded residential, and the file counts 3,398 homes across the designation — the largest recorded unit total of any designation in this batch, concentrated onto a citywide footprint of only 200 lots and reflecting just how densely built this stock is despite its age.

Lot sizes run to a median of 4,906 square feet, with the 90th percentile reaching 9,875 square feet — a moderate spread consistent with a dense, largely built-out commercial core rather than scattered large parcels. The 1945-1975 postwar boom left essentially no mark on the stock, at 0%, while 10% of buildings have gone up since 2000 — a real, if modest, share of modern construction layered onto the older core described above.

Development headroom is real but not universal: 77% of these 200 lots record floor area below their allowance, with a median residual of 4.2 FAR. Historic-district status touches 19% of lots, a meaningful minority share, while 0% sit inside the mapped federal flood zone — an absence that, on a footprint this large, still describes every one of the 200 parcels on file. That combination of broad but partial headroom and a real, if minority, historic-district share describes a designation with more genuine internal variation than a small footprint could ever show. Individual figures for any one of these lots sit on that lot's own page, and the floor-area and height rules that govern this designation are cited, with their sections, in the tables above.