The record, on the page you are already reading.

What it does

New York City publishes what is being built, altered and demolished, but the record lives somewhere other than the page where the question comes up. You are reading a rental listing, or a story about a building, or a thread about a block. The extension closes that gap: click it, and it finds the addresses in the text you can already see and shows what the city holds for each one.

It is the same record as the rest of this site, in the place the question was asked instead of the place the answer is filed.

What the panel shows

• Every filing at the address, with its status, scope and dates.
• What the parcel record says — year built, floors, units, lot and building area, zoning, landmark and historic-district status.
• Open and total violations recorded against the building.
• What is under construction within 200 metres.
• How busy the street is, measured against the rest of the city.
• A side-by-side comparison of two addresses found on the same page.

It runs when you click it, and not before

Nothing happens on page load. There is no standing access to the sites you visit, no list of sites to opt in, and no background watching: clicking the toolbar icon, pressing the keyboard shortcut or using the right-click item grants access to that one tab at that one moment.

An earlier draft had an always-on mode with per-site permissions. It was cut. The reader opens a page, wants the record, clicks — and the permission story reduces to one sentence, which is the version worth shipping.

Every permission, and why

activeTab

Reads the text of the one tab you clicked on, at the moment you click. It grants nothing before the click and nothing after you leave the page.

scripting

Draws the panel into that tab. The panel lives in a shadow root, so it cannot read or restyle the page around it.

contextMenus

Adds one right-click item, so you can select an address in a paragraph and look up that one instead of everything on the page.

storage

Remembers the last few addresses you looked up, in your own browser. It is never uploaded, and Settings clears it.

newyorkdaily.net

The one host the extension may contact — this site, to ask what the record holds for an address.

There are no others. The extension executes no remotely hosted code — every line of it ships inside the package, and the lookup returns plain data, never markup or a template.

What is collected

The address string you looked up reaches this site, because that is the question being asked. The page it came from does not: no URL, no title, no page text, no selection beyond the address itself. There is no account, no sign-in and no identifier attached to a lookup.

The last few addresses you viewed are kept in your own browser so the panel can offer them again, and the extension's Settings page clears them. The privacy policy covers what the site itself logs when the lookup arrives.

What it cannot tell you

A filing is paperwork, not a building. It records what was submitted to the city: many filings are approved and never started, some are withdrawn, and the dates describe when the record changed rather than when anything happened on site. Coverage follows the same catalogue and refresh schedule as the rest of this site, so an address with no recent Department of Buildings activity will show nothing at all.

How the record is built

Install

The extension is not published yet. This page describes what it does and what it asks for; an install link will appear here, and nowhere else on the site, once the listing is live.

Meanwhile the record is fully available on the site itself — every address, every filing, free and without an account. Search the city map