When New York was built.

The city has one peak, and it is the interwar years

8,135 streets carry a datable building stock, holding 1,074,049 buildings between them. The busiest single decade is the 1930s: 295,335 buildings on 1,359 streets. Nothing since has come close, and nothing before the 1910s is more than a rounding error against it.

Everything before 1890 is gathered into one row: it is 100 streets and 5,479 buildings, and fourteen near-empty bars in front of the real shape would be a worse chart than one. Those streets have a section of their own below.

The homes column is worth reading against the buildings column rather than on its own. The 1910s put up 55,437 buildings and 551,820 homes inside them; the 1950s put up 100,963 buildings and fewer than half as many homes. That gap is the difference between a city building apartment blocks and a city building houses.

Each borough has its own century

The same measure, one borough at a time, weighted by buildings rather than by streets — a borough of long blocks and a borough of short ones are not comparable street by street. It runs in one direction: Manhattan is typically 1910s building stock and Staten Island is typically 1970s, with sixty years between them.

Staten Island has more streets than any other borough and the fewest buildings on each of them, which is what a borough built after the bridge and the car looks like in a table.

The oldest lots on record

Streets whose earliest tax lot predates 1850, on streets carrying at least five buildings — one old lot on a street of new buildings says something about the lot and nothing about the street. The typical year column is there for the same reason: DITMAS AVENUE has a lot dated 1652 and a typical building from 1925, so what survives from that date is one or two houses on a street that was otherwise built much later.

Dates this old are the city’s own record and are approximate. A seventeenth-century year on a tax lot usually means the parcel, not the structure standing on it now, and some of them are a best reconstruction rather than a document. Anything earlier than 1625 is treated as a keying error and left out.

Where these numbers come from

Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO) (64uk-42ks), published by the NYC Department of City Planning and read on Sep 11, 2026. A lot with no year built is not counted anywhere on this page, which is why the building total here is smaller than the city’s: the measure is 8,135 streets that have one.

Every street in the tables has a page of its own with its own age panel, its filings and its parcel figures. The same data underneath what is biggest right now · how filings work · every dataset behind the site