Exploring the History of 200 Amsterdam’s Zoning Lot through Public Records
You may have heard about a big court decision that happened in February of this year, ruling that a new high rise tower on Manhattan’s Upper West Side must remove almost half of its upper floors.
The development is 200 Amsterdam, a 55-story tower, and it’s been the subject of an ongoing legal dispute for the past few years. It soars high above its neighbors, and the core of the dispute is that the rules permitted its enormous height were not correctly applied. More specifically, the building is part of an abnormal zoning lot, a legal construct in NYC’s zoning laws that allow multiple parcels of land to be treated as one for the purposes of calculating what is allowed to be built.
The articles I’d read about this dispute made mention of a “gerrymandered zoning lot”, and a “39-sided zoning lot”, but most don’t show a map or try to explain the background. It turns out, it’s pretty damn hard to explain. A bit of searching led to a great visual by the Municipal Art Society, who has been active in the fight to stop the development:
Yep, that’s an irregularly-shaped zoning lot alright. Where did it come from? Why is it shaped that way? How exactly does its size factor into the height of the building? What the heck is a zoning lot, anyway? I wanted to answer these questions and more, and did some research on the history of this block that I’ll share here. Read on for some interesting zoning bits, historic maps, aerial photos, and public land record documents.
First, what are zoning lots and tax lots?
This might be the most difficult concept to grok about this whole ordeal. You might think that if someone owns a parcel of land, that land is in a particular type of zone, and the rules for building size will be based on the size of the parcel. This isn’t aways the case in New York City.
In NYC, parcels of transferrable land are called tax lots. They can be bought and sold, they have clearly defined boundaries, and they are the unit of land that receives a property tax bill (hence the name). The department of Finance maintains the tax map, historically on paper, now digital, that defines where all of the tax lots are. There are about 870,000 tax lots in New York City, and you can quickly look up the property lines on the web. Here’s the tax map for the block that includes the empire state building.
However, there’s a different type of lot defined in the zoning resolution, the zoning lot. Zoning rules are applied to a property’s zoning lot, which may or may not have the same boundaries. The whole point of zoning lots is to provide a way for tax lots that are adjacent to each other to “share” the zoning rules that get applied to them. If you’ve ever heard the term “air rights” used to describe how one building is allowed to be taller because the owner bought their neighbor’s right to build, zoning lots are probably in play.
George Janes explains it well with a simple visual. Zoning lots are not real property, they are collections of real property that are regulated as one lot:
It’s worth looking up the actual, legal definition of a zoning lot in the NYC zoning regulation to help understand where they come from:
I’ve truncated the full text in this screenshot, so go read it for yourself to see the whole thing. I am not a lawyer, but to summarize:
- (a) and (b) appear to set the default state when zoning lots were first defined (1961). When several contiguous tax lots exist in the same block with the same owner, they are one zoning lot. Otherwise, each tax lot is also its own zoning lot.
That establishes the initial map of all zoning lots. Zoning lots don’t really matter until you want to build a building, so the other two provisions allow for new zoning lots to be defined when applying for a building permit:
- (c) says that many contiguous tax lots next to each other with the same owner are one zoning lot
- (d) says that many contiguous tax lots next to each other owned by different parties are a zoning lot when the various owners collectively declare it.
Well, that’s all pretty straightforward, so all we have to do is go online and find the official zoning lot map to see the current state of the world, right?
Wrong.
While it’s easy to look up information about a tax lot, and easy to see what zoning district it is located in, its is quite difficult to lookup its zoning lot. For example, I can look up 200 Amsterdam in ZoLa, see the tax lot boundaries, and learn that it is in an R-8 zoning district with C2–5 commercial overlay. But remember, the rules for these zoning districts apply to zoning lots, not to tax lots.
If the tax lot and zoning lot are one and the same (which is still true in most cases), I can start figuring out how large a building can be built on this site. If they’re not, I have no idea what is allowed to be built until I can figure out the size of the zoning lot and what else is already built on it.
🤔 Why doesn’t ZoLa also show the zoning lots? Short answer: There is no database of zoning lots in NYC.
If you want to find out a property’s zoning lot, you have to do records research.
Trying to Understand 200 Amsterdam’s Zoning Lot
The provisions of the zoning resolution require various documents to be filed with the city register’s office to define zoning lots. These are mixed in among millions of records of various types, including things like property sales, deeds, and mortgages dating back to 1966 in an information system called ACRIS.
Searching for 200 Amsterdam in ACRIS yields 62 documents. There are several types of ACRIS documents associated with creation and modification of zoning lots, including DECLARATION, CERTIFICATE, or SUNDRY AGREEMENT. I learned that the certificates contain are the easiest to parse, as they only include a list of parties and a description and sketch of the boundaries.
You can click “IMG” to inspect the document. Each starts with a standardized form listing all the parties and other administrative info, followed by the scanned document.
Here’s the first page of the most recent zoning lot certificate for 200 Amsterdam. It’s defining a new zoning that has been declared by 8 different owners of contiguous property on the same block (subdivision d of the zoning lot definition above, if you recall):
After naming all the parties, it goes into a written description of the boundaries. This one is particularly long, as the “gerrymandered zoning lot” has 39 sides. Here is just the first page of the “metes and bounds” description of the new zoning lot:
Curiously, the zoning lot description contains a small arc in addition to all the linear edges. 🤔
Finally, at the end of the document we get a site plan or sketch. This one appears to be showing two zoning lots, but the one actually described in the document is labeled as “ZONING LOT 2”:
This diagram shows the current state of the world with regards to the zoning lot, though it’s a bit hard to make out the grainy scan. This graphic from the BSA Appeal shows the zoning lot more clearly, along with the tax lot boundaries:
This document shows the current zoning lot, but what changed? What did they look like prior to this filing? This document was filed because some change was made to the zoning lot, presumably just prior to the issuance of the building permit in 2016.
To explore the evolution of this zoning lot, we need to go back in time and figure out what changed and when. But first, a quick look at the “partial tax lot” problem.
Can a Zoning Lot Consist of Parts of Tax Lots?
If you look at the graphic above, you’ll notice the zoning lot (in red) does not include full tax lots, it appears to be “carved out” of several adjacent lots. The zoning resolution uses the term “two or more lots of record” in its various definitions of zoning lot, which seems to mean it shouldn’t be possible to have a zoning lot like this.
This is the core argument against the developer. The zoning lot is illegal, so the building permit that allowed such a tall building was not valid. The developer argues that there is precedent for zoning lots to consist of partial tax lots, and that it is generally bad for everyone to add more unpredictability to the development process (This newyorkyimby.com article has a good summary of the developer’s side of the argument.)
The developer has appealed, so we’ll see how this shapes up. For now, the ruling from last month establishes that zoning lots MUST consist of complete tax lots, so that’s that.
A Journey Back in Time
On to where this gerrymandered lot came from. The block that 200 Amsterdam sits on is known as a “megablock”. It’s a place where the rigid street grid of Manhattan has been interrupted allowing for larger parcels.
We can look up fire insurance maps hosted by the NYPL to see what existed here before 1960. In 1956, the land that is now Manhattan Block 1158 was three blocks, 1158, 1160, and 1161. They looked a lot more like other blocks of the grid. This was an area known as San Juan Hill, and was part of the massive “urban renewal” project that brought us Lincoln Center (and destroyed a neighborhood).
From a 2017 New York Times piece summarizing the project:
“Lincoln Center was the crown-jewel project of the Mayor’s Committee on Slum Clearance, which was overseen by Robert Moses, the man who reshaped the city in the mid-20th century. The “urban renewal” plan, which leveled 18 city blocks on the Upper West Side, also included educational, commercial and residential facilities.
The project displaced more than 7,000 lower-class families and 800 businesses. Few, if any, of the 4,400 new housing units were intended for the area’s previous residents, who were almost exclusively black and Hispanic. Even worse, the relocation assistance promised by the committee never materialized.”
It’s pretty wild that this modern-day urban planning dispute has direct ties back to Robert Moses. There was a community here, and we leveled it in the name of progress. This video shows scenes of street life in this neighborhood that was “renewed” in 1960.
Here’s a shot from west 68th street and Amsterdam, looking northwest after much of the future megablock had already been demolished.
Consolidating three blocks into one means “erasing” streets. There’s a process for this, and it yields some very interesting engineering drawings that the good people at the Department of City Planning have scanned and published online. We can explore the city’s modifications to the street grid using the NYC Streets app.
Here we see the formation of the megablocks for Lincoln Center and Lincoln Towers.
In addition to erasing streets, the new megablock is also divided into new tax lots. In 1966, the tax maps show the layout of tax lots on the new block. We can see lots 133 and 134 in the bottom-right. These will eventually be consolidated into the present-day 200 Amsterdam site. (This image was accessed using the Tax Map Application, maintained by the NYC DoITT GIS team for the Department of Finance)
So when did the gerrymandered zoning lot come into existence? The appeal to the Board of Standard and Appeals contains a thorough history of important events, and was my primary source for trying to understand the timeline of events. I’ve created some map graphics for each to help illustrate the changes over time.
- 1987 — A new zoning lot was created consisting of lots 1, 30, 70, 80, and 90
- Declaration of Zoning Lot Subdivision and Restrictions (ACRIS)
- 1987 — This new zoning lot was immediately subdivided into two zoning lots. One contained the buildings and was referred to as “The Towers Parcel” (blue), the other included open space and was referred to as “The Vacant Parcel” (red)
- Declaration of Zoning Lot Subdivision and Restrictions (ACRIS)
- 1987 — The open space zoning lot was then combined with lots 65, 10, and 12.
- Declaration of Zoning Lot Restrictions (ACRIS)
- The 1987 Zoning Lot Description and Ownership Statement includes this sketch of the same:
The same document also describes the new combination as “The Combined Gerrymandered Parcel and Commercial Parcels”. So the term Gerrymandered wasn’t applied by the opposition to 200 Amsterdam, it was actually called this in the legal documents that accompanied it 30 years ago!
- 2007 — The zoning lot was combined with tax lots 133, and 134, which would be the future site of the 200 Amsterdam development.
- Declaration of Zoning Lot Restrictions (ACRIS)
The 2007 declaration includes this sketch of the zoning lot.
- 2015 — The zoning lot was subdivided, creating a new zoning lot (green) from tax lots 10, 12, and 18 and a sliver of the original open space zoning lot.
- The zoning lot is effectively tax lots 133 and 65 connected by unbuildable open space carved out of the larger condo tax lots.
- Declaration With Respect to Subdivision of Zoning Lot (ACRIS)
So that’s the evolution of zoning lots over the course of a half-century on Manhattan block 1158. It’s interesting to note that the bizarre shape of the current gerrymandered lot was not new or even related to 200 Amsterdam, it came into existence 30 years ago and was subsequently combined with other (complete) tax lots.
The part that’s missing in this analysis is the agreements between the various owners concerning the transfer of development rights. 200 Amsterdam was allowed to build tall because it is on a zoning lot with a lot of open space, but all of that open space is on someone else’s property. Digging in on these transactions would be worth another research binge and a subsequent blog post.
The Zoning Math
I wanted to explore the rules a bit deeper on the zoning rules applied to this tax lot, and how the calculations were made when applying for the building permit.
The entire block that the project sits on is zoned R8. An overview of the R8 district rules on the Department of City Planning Website:
200 Amsterdam is a small(12,042sf) tax lot , but as we know it’s located on a large (110,794sf) zoning lot. You can see in the zoning diagram provided, the building takes up almost the entire lot at its base, then gets gradually skinnier to keep the mass behind the sky exposure plane.
[Edit 5 March 2020: This section included FAR and Open Space ratio calculations that a reader pointed out as incorrect. I’ve removed the section and will update it when I can spend some more time to verify my numbers]
Conclusion
It’s pretty remarkable that the information necessary to piece this story together are readily accessible via the internet. The NYPL publishes scans of atlases, DOF publishes old tax maps, DCP publishes engineering drawings of street closures, ZoLa puts modern-day lot information at our fingertips, and ACRIS contains a half-century of real estate records, all for the taking.
I even used modern tax lot spatial data (MapPLUTO) to reconstruct the historic tax lots for the custom graphics above.
Regardless of how you feel about the new tower at 200 Amsterdam, I hope this post has clarified some of the concepts at play in the dispute. I also hope I’ve piqued your curiosity and inspired you to do some public records spelunking of your own. Thanks for reading!
