M2-3 Zoning District — New York City

Scale is the defining fact of this designation. Across roughly 73 tax lots, the median parcel runs 155,975 square feet, and the 90th percentile reaches 457,100 — sizes that put every lot in the file well beyond the ordinary residential or commercial parcel found elsewhere in this comparison set. Ground held at that scale tends to serve a small number of large, singular uses rather than many smaller buildings, and a file built around parcels this size behaves differently from one built around ordinary city blocks. Even the smaller half of this file, below its own median, would still count among the larger recorded lots on most other designations in this batch.

The recorded building classes back that up: transportation facilities account for 55% of the file, vacant land another 16%, and outdoor recreational facilities 7% — a mix of infrastructure, open ground, and recreation rather than standard construction. Land use tracks closely, with transportation and utility use covering 63% of lots, vacant land 16%, and commercial and office use 8%. This is not, on the record, a built-up designation in the way most zoning categories in this file are, and the close match between the building-class and land-use figures suggests a stable, long-settled pattern of use rather than one in transition. The 7% recorded as outdoor recreational facilities is itself the largest such share seen in this batch.

Only 1% of these lots are recorded as residential, and the file counts just 57 units in total across the entire designation — a small number that fits ground built around infrastructure and open space rather than housing. As with several of the largest-parcel, infrastructure-leaning designations in this file, no reliable year-built or height coverage exists here, an absence in the record rather than an estimate filled in around it, consistent with ground that has never been tracked the way ordinary buildings are.

The federal flood map places 85% of these roughly 73 lots inside the mapped Special Flood Hazard Area — one of the higher shares recorded in this file, consistent with large waterfront-scale parcels used for transportation and utility purposes. That is a statement about the regulatory flood boundary, not a ledger of which individual lots have taken on water. None of the lots, 0%, carry historic-district status on record, rounding out a file that is, on every recorded measure, built for scale and infrastructure rather than for people to live in.