Between the Lines

120 Broadway, Manhattan

Ernest R. Graham's Equitable Life Building, completed in 1915 at 120 Broadway, consumed every square inch of its lot. It rose 538 feet straight up from the sidewalk without a single setback, a sheer cliff of limestone and steel that swallowed an entire city block. The building cast a seven-acre shadow over Lower Manhattan, plunging neighboring streets and offices into a permanent midday twilight. Property owners in its shadow watched their rents crater, their tenants flee toward what little sunlight remained.

The outcry was swift and ferocious. Real estate interests, civic reformers, public health advocates, and Fifth Avenue merchants—who feared garment factories would creep north without controls—formed an unlikely coalition. Within a year of the Equitable's completion, the city adopted the 1916 Zoning Resolution, America's first comprehensive zoning law. The resolution divided New York into residential, commercial, and unrestricted districts, and introduced height and setback regulations tied to street width.

The Equitable Building still stands, a monument to the power of a single bad actor to galvanize systemic change. Its hulking presence on Broadway is a reminder that zoning in New York was never an abstract exercise in urban planning—it was born from the simple, visceral outrage of people who had lost their sunlight.

Various Manhattan locations

The setback rules embedded in the 1916 Zoning Resolution did not dictate a specific architectural style, but they produced one anyway. The law required buildings to step back from the street as they rose, following a diagonal "sky exposure plane" calculated from the center of the road. The wider the street, the taller a building could climb before its first setback. The result was the ziggurat silhouette—what New Yorkers came to call the "wedding cake"—that defines the Manhattan skyline to this day.

Architects of the 1920s and 1930s transformed this regulatory constraint into artistic opportunity. The Art Deco towers that rose during this era—the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, One Wall Street, the American Radiator Building—are masterpieces of setback design, their terraced profiles as much a product of zoning math as of artistic vision. Hugh Ferriss, the architectural delineator, famously rendered the maximum building envelopes allowed under the code, producing haunting charcoal drawings of stepped monoliths that look remarkably like what actually got built.

The 1916 resolution also contained a crucial loophole: a tower of unlimited height could rise from 25 percent of the lot area. This is why so many setback skyscrapers culminate in slender crowns and spires—the architects pushed as much floor area as possible into the base, then sent a thin tower soaring skyward. It was a conversation between regulation and ambition, and the New York skyline is the permanent record of that negotiation.

Queens, NY

The 1916 Zoning Resolution established a principle that remains foundational to this day: the segregation of land use into distinct categories. Every parcel in New York City is assigned a zoning designation that determines what can be built on it—residential, commercial, or manufacturing. Queens, with its sprawling geography and extraordinary diversity of built environments, offers perhaps the clearest illustration of how these categories shape the texture of daily life.

In Queens, you can walk from single-family detached houses on R1-zoned lots in Bayside to dense commercial corridors along Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, zoned C4 to permit large retail and mixed-use development. The industrial zones along the Newtown Creek waterfront still bear the M1 and M3 designations that once accommodated factories and warehouses. Each zone carries a set of rules governing building height, lot coverage, setbacks, and permitted uses—a hidden code that explains why one block looks completely different from the next.

The genius and the tragedy of use-based zoning is the same: it brings order by imposing separation. The system that keeps a rendering plant out of a residential neighborhood also makes it illegal to put an apartment above a corner store in many neighborhoods, or to open a small workshop on a residential street. The history of New York zoning since 1916 has been, in many ways, a long reckoning with the rigidities of those original categories.

LaGuardia Place, Greenwich Village

The statue of Fiorello LaGuardia that stands in the small Greenwich Village park bearing his name honors a mayor who transformed the physical fabric of New York City more than perhaps any other. Serving three terms from 1934 to 1945, LaGuardia inherited a city mired in Tammany Hall corruption and Depression-era poverty. He responded with an unprecedented building campaign, leveraging New Deal funds to construct highways, bridges, parks, public housing, and the airport that now bears his name.

LaGuardia understood that shaping the city's growth required not just building things but controlling what others could build. He empowered Robert Moses as parks commissioner and oversaw the expansion of the city's zoning apparatus, using land-use regulations as a tool of reform. His administration tightened enforcement of building codes, condemned unsafe tenements, and pushed for the public housing projects that would reshape neighborhoods from the Lower East Side to the South Bronx.

The statue's location in Greenwich Village is fitting. The neighborhood became a flashpoint for zoning battles in the decades after LaGuardia, as residents fought to preserve its low-rise character against encroaching high-rises. The community activism that emerged here would eventually lead to the creation of historic districts and the landmarks preservation movement—tools that LaGuardia himself might have appreciated, even as they challenged the top-down planning ethos he embodied.

111 W 57th St, Manhattan

Steinway Tower, the impossibly slender residential spire at 111 West 57th Street, rises 1,428 feet above Midtown with a width-to-height ratio of approximately 1:24—making it, by some measures, the most slender skyscraper ever built. Designed by SHoP Architects with interiors by Studio Sofield, the building sits atop the landmarked Steinway Hall, a 1925 showroom for Steinway & Sons pianos. The tower's terra cotta and bronze facade pays homage to the decorative traditions of its Art Deco neighbors along Billionaires' Row.

But the real story of Steinway Tower is not its architecture—it is its air rights. The tower's extraordinary height was made possible by the accumulation of transferable development rights from neighboring properties. The developer, JDS Development Group, purchased the unused air rights from adjacent buildings, effectively borrowing the sky above shorter neighbors to stack floors above what the site's own zoning would have permitted. This mechanism—air rights transfers—has become the financial engine of supertall construction in Manhattan.

The result is a building that is simultaneously a feat of structural engineering, a product of financial engineering, and a monument to the flexibility baked into New York's zoning code. Critics argue that these transfers concentrate wealth and views at the top while casting literal and figurative shadows on the neighborhoods below. Defenders counter that they enable density without demolition. Steinway Tower is the latest entry in a debate as old as the Equitable Building—about how high is too high, and who gets to decide.

60th St & 5th Ave, Manhattan

The intersection of 60th Street and Fifth Avenue marks one of the most consequential zoning boundaries in Manhattan. To the south stretches the Midtown commercial corridor, one of the densest concentrations of office and retail space on Earth. To the north lies the residential grandeur of the Upper East Side, where zoning has long protected the low-rise, high-wealth character of the neighborhood's side streets while permitting taller buildings along the avenues.

This boundary did not occur naturally. It was drawn, debated, and redrawn by successive zoning commissions, each responding to the political pressures of their moment. The transition from commercial Midtown to residential Upper East Side is written in the building heights: the towers shrink, the setbacks deepen, and the street wall gives way to doorman buildings and limestone townhouses. A simple street sign at this corner marks the line where two New Yorks meet.

The scavenger hunt asks you to photograph this street sign—a mundane piece of city infrastructure that, in context, represents something profound. Every street sign in New York sits within a zoning district, and that district determines the shape of everything around it. The sign is legible; the zoning, invisible. Between the Lines is, at its core, about learning to see the invisible rules that shape the visible city.

Various Manhattan locations

The setback skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s represent the most creatively productive collision of law and architecture in New York's history. The 1916 Zoning Resolution did not tell architects what their buildings should look like—it told them what shape the sky above their lots could take. Within those invisible envelopes, architects like William Van Alen, Raymond Hood, and Ralph Walker invented an entire vocabulary of stepped massing, decorative crowns, and tapered profiles that became synonymous with the Jazz Age metropolis.

This mini-game asks you to match nine architects to their setback masterworks scattered across Manhattan. The Chrysler Building's stainless steel sunburst crown, designed by Van Alen in a feverish race against H. Craig Severance's 40 Wall Street. Raymond Hood's American Radiator Building, clad in black brick with gold terra cotta ornament, a building that looks like it was carved from onyx. Ralph Walker's One Wall Street, whose Art Deco lobby contains perhaps the finest mosaic work in the city. The Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, which pushed the setback form to its logical extreme—a building that steps back five times before launching its mooring-mast tower toward the sky.

Each of these buildings represents a different solution to the same mathematical problem: how to maximize floor area within the setback envelope while creating something beautiful. That they succeeded so spectacularly is a testament not just to the architects' talent but to the generative power of well-crafted constraints. The 1916 code did not produce mediocrity—it produced a skyline.

375 Park Avenue, Manhattan

The Seagram Building at 375 Park Avenue, completed in 1958, is Mies van der Rohe's bronze-clad masterwork and one of the most influential buildings of the twentieth century. Designed in collaboration with Philip Johnson, it rises 38 stories as a sleek, dark curtain wall set behind a half-acre granite plaza—a radical gesture of restraint on an avenue where every developer built wall-to-wall to maximize rentable floor area. Samuel Bronfman, the Seagram whisky magnate, wanted a building that would serve as a corporate monument. Mies gave him a monument to the power of empty space.

The plaza was revolutionary. At a time when Park Avenue was a canyon of office towers pressing against their lot lines, Mies pulled the Seagram Building back ninety feet from the sidewalk. The resulting open space, furnished with marble benches and twin reflecting pools flanking the entrance, became one of the most celebrated public spaces in the city. It was a corporate gift to the street—and the city took notice.

When New York overhauled its zoning code in 1961, the Seagram plaza became the template for a new concept: incentive zoning. Under the new rules, developers could earn bonus floor area—additional stories—in exchange for providing publicly accessible open space at street level. The idea was elegant in theory: more public amenity in exchange for more private profit. In practice, it produced hundreds of windswept, sunless plazas—"bonus plazas" that were public in name but hostile in design. The Seagram plaza succeeded because Mies was a genius; the code assumed every developer would be one too.

Garment District, Manhattan

The Garment District, roughly bounded by 34th and 42nd Streets between Fifth and Ninth Avenues, was once the beating heart of American fashion manufacturing. At its peak in the mid-twentieth century, the district employed hundreds of thousands of workers and produced the majority of clothing sold in the United States. The Special Garment Center District, established in 1987, was created specifically to protect this industrial ecosystem from the relentless pressure of Midtown office development.

The special district imposed restrictions on the conversion of manufacturing loft space to office use, effectively creating a zoning firewall around the garment trade. The logic was straightforward: without regulatory protection, landlords would convert every sewing floor into an advertising agency, and the industry—with its fragile supply chain of cutters, sewers, pattern makers, and button suppliers all within walking distance of each other—would evaporate. For decades, the district held.

But the global economy had other plans. Manufacturing migrated overseas, and the protective zoning increasingly preserved empty lofts rather than working factories. In 2018, the city significantly relaxed the Garment Center restrictions, acknowledging that the district's future lay in a mix of uses rather than a monoculture of manufacturing. The mannequins in the shop windows along Seventh Avenue—posed in fabric samples and pinned with tomorrow's patterns—remain as totems of an industry that zoning tried, and ultimately failed, to save.

Brooklyn, NY

Mandatory Inclusionary Housing, or MIH, is one of New York City's most ambitious attempts to harness the power of private development for public benefit. Adopted in 2016 under Mayor de Blasio, MIH requires that any development in a rezoned area set aside a permanent percentage of its units as affordable housing. The policy was born from decades of frustration with voluntary inclusionary programs, which produced far fewer affordable units than the city needed.

Brooklyn has become MIH's primary testing ground. In neighborhoods like East New York, Bushwick, and parts of Crown Heights, rezonings have triggered MIH requirements that force developers to include anywhere from 20 to 30 percent affordable units in their projects. Some developments have gone further: certain sites have committed to 60 percent affordability, double the standard MIH requirement, often by layering public subsidies on top of the zoning mandate.

The policy remains deeply contested. Supporters argue that MIH is the only mechanism that guarantees permanent affordability in a city where market-rate rents have soared beyond the reach of most residents. Critics counter that MIH enables gentrification by rezoning historically low-rise communities of color for high-density development, displacing existing residents even as it creates new affordable units. The debate over MIH is, at its heart, a debate about whether zoning can be both a tool of growth and a tool of equity—or whether those goals are fundamentally in tension.

Gramercy Park, Manhattan

Gramercy Park is an urban anomaly: a private park in a public city. Established in 1831 by developer Samuel Ruggles, who drained a swamp and deeded the fenced-in green to the owners of the surrounding 66 lots, the park has remained locked to the general public for nearly two centuries. Only residents of the buildings that ring the park receive keys—actual, physical brass keys—and the tradition persists as one of New York's most enduring symbols of residential exclusivity.

The park's existence predates zoning by 85 years, but it embodies the same impulse that would later drive zoning law: the desire to control the character of a place by controlling access to it. The private deed restrictions that govern Gramercy Park—limiting building heights, mandating setbacks, preserving sightlines to the green—function as a kind of proto-zoning, a set of land-use rules enforced not by the city but by property owners themselves.

Gramercy Park sits at the intersection of several zoning concepts that the scavenger hunt explores: private versus public space, the use of deed restrictions as land-use tools, and the tension between exclusivity and the public good. In a city where the battle over who gets to use which spaces defines neighborhoods, Gramercy Park is the original gated community—elegant, intentional, and unapologetic about drawing lines.

Staten Island, NY

Floor Area Ratio—FAR—is perhaps the single most important number in New York City zoning, and yet most New Yorkers have never heard of it. Introduced in the 1961 Zoning Resolution, FAR replaced the complex setback formulas of 1916 with a deceptively simple concept: the total floor area of a building, divided by the area of its lot. A FAR of 1.0 means you can build one square foot of floor space for every square foot of lot. A FAR of 10.0 means ten square feet per lot foot—a ten-story building covering the entire lot, or a twenty-story building covering half of it.

Staten Island, the least densely developed of the five boroughs, provides a clear illustration of how low FAR values shape a landscape. Much of the borough is zoned R1 through R3, with FARs ranging from 0.5 to 0.9—numbers that effectively mandate single-family homes on generous lots. These low-density zones produce the suburban character that distinguishes Staten Island from the rest of New York City: detached houses, front lawns, driveways, and a pace of life that feels more like New Jersey than Manhattan.

The 1961 resolution's adoption of FAR was a philosophical shift. The old setback rules had shaped buildings from the outside in, sculpting their profiles against the sky. FAR works from the inside out, controlling the total amount of usable space regardless of the building's shape. A developer with a FAR of 15 can distribute that bulk however they like—a squat slab or a slender tower—as long as the total floor area does not exceed the ratio. It gave architects new freedom but also created new problems, as bland glass boxes replaced the sculptural setback towers of the earlier era.

The Bronx, NY

Accessory Dwelling Units—ADUs—are small, self-contained housing units built on the same lot as an existing home. They might be basement apartments, garage conversions, or backyard cottages. For decades, New York City's zoning code effectively prohibited them in most residential neighborhoods, treating the single-family home as an inviolable unit. The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity, adopted in 2024, changed that, legalizing ADUs across the city for the first time.

The Bronx, with its large stock of one- and two-family homes—particularly in neighborhoods like Throggs Neck, Morris Park, and Pelham Bay—stands to be one of the boroughs most affected by ADU legalization. Homeowners can now convert basements, build above garages, or construct small detached units in their backyards, creating rental income for themselves and new housing supply for the city. The change is incremental by design: each ADU adds just one or two units, but multiplied across tens of thousands of eligible lots, the cumulative impact could be substantial.

ADU legalization represents a philosophical departure from the zoning code's historical preference for keeping residential neighborhoods static. The traditional zoning bargain—you can live here, but only in the way we prescribe—is giving way to a more flexible framework that treats homeowners as partners in solving the housing crisis rather than as threats to neighborhood character. Whether the Bronx's homeowners embrace this new freedom, and whether their neighbors welcome the resulting changes, will be one of the key tests of City of Yes.

Hunts Point, Bronx

The story of Inspiration Point begins with the Spofford Juvenile Center, a notorious detention facility in Hunts Point that held children as young as seven in conditions that advocates described as inhumane. After decades of protest, Spofford was finally shuttered in 2011, and the five-acre site sat vacant as the city debated its future. In 2018, the land was rezoned, and what has risen in its place is a remarkable act of urban transformation: 740 units of 100 percent affordable housing, community spaces, and a cultural arts center called Inspiration Point.

Hunts Point is a peninsula in the South Bronx that has long been defined by its industrial character—it is home to the Hunts Point Cooperative Market, the largest food distribution center in the world. The neighborhood's residents have endured decades of environmental injustice: truck traffic, diesel pollution, and the stigma of hosting both a massive produce market and a juvenile prison. The Spofford redevelopment represents an attempt to rebalance that equation, replacing a symbol of punishment with one of possibility.

Inspiration Point, the arts center at the heart of the development, will host the closing celebration for Between the Lines—a fitting choice. The building sits on land that was literally rezoned from institutional to residential use, a single parcel whose transformation encapsulates the promise and complexity of zoning as a tool for social change. The question that Inspiration Point answers is not just what can be built here, but what a community deserves.

150-160 W 12th St, Manhattan

The Greenwich Lane, a luxury residential complex at 150-160 West 12th Street, occupies the site of the former Women's House of Detention, a twelve-story Art Deco jail that operated from 1932 to 1974. The prison held women accused of offenses ranging from prostitution to political dissent—Angela Davis was among its most famous inmates. After its demolition, the site became a community garden, and for decades, activists fought to preserve it as public green space in one of the most park-starved parts of the Village.

They lost. In 2013, the site was rezoned to permit luxury residential development, and the FXCollaborative-designed complex that replaced the garden now contains 200 condominium units priced well into the millions. The rezoning was a source of profound bitterness in a neighborhood that had already watched its bohemian identity give way to wealth. The garden's defenders argued that the site carried a moral weight—that the ground where women had been incarcerated should serve the public, not the market.

The Greenwich Lane illustrates one of zoning's most uncomfortable truths: that a rezoning is not merely a technical adjustment to a land-use map but a political act with winners and losers. The developer won density; the community lost open space. The new residents won river views and Sub-Zero kitchens; the neighborhood lost a piece of its history. In the ongoing argument about what New York's zoning should optimize for, the Greenwich Lane is a case study in what gets sacrificed.

Pier 17, South Street Seaport

Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport has been reinvented twice, and both reinventions required bending the city's zoning rules. The original 1985 development—a Rouse Company "festival marketplace" modeled on Boston's Faneuil Hall—was a suburban-style shopping mall plopped onto the waterfront in a well-meaning but tone-deaf attempt to revitalize Lower Manhattan's decaying port. It attracted tourists but alienated locals, and by the 2000s it was widely regarded as a failure.

The $785 million replacement, designed by SHoP Architects and completed in 2018, required a special rezoning in 2013 that redrew the rules for the site. The new zoning increased the required amount of publicly accessible rooftop space—Pier 17's rooftop has become one of the city's most popular outdoor performance venues—while nixing a proposal for a giant illuminated sign that the Seaport's historic district neighbors found incompatible with the area's maritime character.

The Seaport rezoning illustrates the granular, site-specific nature of modern zoning negotiations. Every element was debated: the height of the new building, the amount of public space, the size and illumination of signage, the relationship between the new construction and the historic ships moored nearby. Zoning at this scale is less about broad policy than about specific compromises—about deciding, block by block, what a particular piece of the city should become.

Brooklyn Waterfront

Brooklyn's waterfront has been the subject of some of the most intensive rezoning activity in the city's history. From Greenpoint to Red Hook, former industrial parcels have been systematically rezoned for high-density residential development, producing a wall of glassy towers that has fundamentally altered the borough's shoreline. Against this backdrop, a site-specific rezoning for commercial use stands out as unusual—a deliberate choice to bring offices and retail to a stretch of waterfront where the default trajectory was more apartments.

The decision to zone for commercial rather than residential use reflects a growing awareness that neighborhoods need more than housing to thrive. The Brooklyn waterfront's rapid residential development created thousands of new apartments but relatively few jobs, services, or places to work. A commercial building in this context is a bet on economic diversity—an argument that a healthy neighborhood needs a mix of uses, not just a monoculture of luxury condos.

Site-specific rezonings like this one require a developer to navigate the city's Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, or ULURP—a public process that gives community boards, borough presidents, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council all a say. The process is notoriously slow and politicized, but it represents the democratic friction that prevents zoning from becoming purely a tool of private profit. Every rezoning is a negotiation, and this one negotiated something different.

Bushwick, Brooklyn

The Rheingold Brewery site in Bushwick is a cautionary tale about the gap between zoning promises and zoning outcomes. The five-block parcel was once home to the Rheingold Brewing Company, a Brooklyn institution whose "Miss Rheingold" beauty pageant was a mid-century cultural phenomenon. After the brewery closed in 1976, the site sat largely vacant for decades, a hulking reminder of the borough's industrial decline.

In 2013, the site was rezoned for residential use. The rezoning was secured on the strength of a promise: the developer committed to making 30 percent of new units affordable, well above the typical requirement. But the developer subsequently sold the site to new owners who argued they were not bound by the original affordability commitment. The result was a firestorm of community outrage and a lesson in the limits of zoning as an enforcement mechanism.

The buildings that ODA Architecture designed for the site are striking—angular, eye-catching residential blocks that have brought a jolt of architectural ambition to a neighborhood long defined by low-slung warehouses and walk-up tenements. But the beauty of the architecture cannot fully disguise the broken promise at the project's foundation. The Rheingold story illustrates a fundamental vulnerability in the rezoning process: zoning changes run with the land, but the commitments made to secure them do not always survive a change in ownership.

1 Beard St, Brooklyn

When the City Planning Commission approved the rezoning of a former shipyard in Red Hook to allow the construction of a 346,000-square-foot IKEA store in 2004, the decision was both celebrated and mourned. Red Hook, an isolated waterfront neighborhood separated from the rest of Brooklyn by the elevated Gowanus Expressway, had been struggling economically for decades. The promise of a major retailer—with jobs, foot traffic, and the implicit validation that a global corporation saw potential in the neighborhood—was genuinely exciting to many residents.

But an IKEA is a profoundly suburban building: a massive blue box surrounded by a parking lot, designed for car access in a neighborhood with almost no subway service. The rezoning required converting the site from manufacturing to commercial use and granting special permits for the big-box format. Critics argued that the store would generate truck traffic, undermine the neighborhood's gritty waterfront character, and set a precedent for more suburban-style development on Brooklyn's waterfront.

In the years since its opening, IKEA Red Hook has become a veritable Brooklyn institution, complete with its own NYC Ferry stop. The store has not destroyed Red Hook's character—if anything, the neighborhood's transformation has been driven more by residential gentrification than by Swedish furniture. But the IKEA rezoning remains a useful case study in the tensions between economic development and neighborhood identity, and in the difficulty of applying industrial-era zoning categories to a post-industrial waterfront.

Gowanus, Brooklyn

The park at the northern end of the Gowanus rezoning corridor—named for a U.S. Vice President and featuring a Spanish-American War monument—marks the starting point of one of the most closely watched rezonings of the de Blasio era. In 2019, the city approved the rezoning of a 14-block corridor along the Gowanus Canal from industrial to mixed-use, paving the way for approximately 8,500 new apartments, new schools, and new parks along one of the most polluted waterways in America.

The Gowanus Canal is a Superfund site, a 1.8-mile waterway so contaminated by decades of industrial dumping that its mud is laced with heavy metals, coal tar, and other toxins. The EPA's cleanup, ongoing since 2010, is one of the most complex environmental remediation projects in the country. Rezoning the canal's banks for residential use before the cleanup is complete struck many as premature—building housing on contaminated land, quite literally.

The rezoning nonetheless moved forward, propelled by the city's desperate need for housing and the political logic of building density near transit. The Gowanus corridor is served by multiple subway lines, and transit-oriented development has become a mantra of modern urban planning. The resulting negotiations produced commitments to affordable housing, infrastructure improvements, and flood resilience measures. Whether the Gowanus rezoning will be remembered as visionary or reckless depends on questions that will take decades to answer.

Williamsburg, Brooklyn

The sloped green space designed by Kiss + Cathcart along the Williamsburg waterfront is the single completed section of Bushwick Inlet Park, a 28-acre park that was promised to the community as part of the famously contentious 2005 Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning. That rezoning transformed a mile of industrial waterfront into some of the most expensive residential real estate in Brooklyn, permitting glass towers up to 40 stories where sheet-metal warehouses once stood.

The park was the community's consolation prize. In exchange for accepting dramatic increases in density and the effective end of the neighborhood's industrial waterfront, residents were promised a continuous waterfront park stretching from North 9th Street to Quay Street. Twenty years later, most of that park remains unbuilt. The city acquired most of the necessary parcels, but construction has been delayed repeatedly by funding shortfalls, environmental remediation requirements, and political indifference.

The Williamsburg rezoning is perhaps the most cited example of the broken promises that can accompany major rezonings. The towers went up quickly—developers move fast when profits beckon—but the public amenities that were supposed to offset the community's sacrifice have materialized slowly, if at all. The small completed park, lovely as it is, serves as a reminder that zoning deals are only as good as the political will to enforce them.

Astoria, Queens

The fraternal twin towers at Halletts Point—standing 27 and 32 stories along the Astoria waterfront—are the latest phase of a massive residential development by the Durst Organization on a formerly industrial stretch of the East River. The site, near the NYC Ferry stop that opened in 2017, exemplifies a pattern that has reshaped the city's waterfront over the past two decades: the systematic rezoning of industrial parcels for high-rise housing, complemented by new public parks and waterfront esplanades.

The Halletts Point development, when fully completed, will include approximately 2,400 apartments across multiple towers, along with retail space, a public school, and waterfront open space. The project required extensive environmental review and community negotiation, including commitments to affordable housing and local hiring. The Durst Organization, one of the city's most prominent developers, positioned the project as a model of transit-oriented, mixed-income waterfront development.

But the sheer scale of waterfront residential construction across the city has raised questions about whether this model is sustainable. Each rezoned waterfront site adds housing but also strains infrastructure—schools, transit, sewer systems—that was designed for a lower-density neighborhood. The towers at Halletts Point rise above a neighborhood of two-story brick houses and public housing projects, a juxtaposition that makes visible the inequalities that zoning can both address and exacerbate.

Citywide

This bonus challenge asks participants to imagine the future of New York's transit network by proposing a location for a new NYC Ferry stop. The ferry system, relaunched in 2017 under Mayor de Blasio with heavy public subsidies, has become one of the city's most beloved transit options despite carrying a fraction of the ridership of the subway or bus systems. Its routes connect waterfront neighborhoods that are often poorly served by other transit—a geography that overlaps significantly with the sites being rezoned for new development.

The relationship between ferry service and zoning is symbiotic. New ferry stops make waterfront locations more accessible, increasing their development potential and thus their attractiveness to developers seeking rezonings. New residential development, in turn, generates the ridership that justifies ferry service. This feedback loop has been particularly visible in neighborhoods like Red Hook, Williamsburg, Long Island City, and Astoria, where ferry stops and residential towers have arrived in tandem.

By asking you to propose a new ferry stop, the scavenger hunt invites you to think about the relationship between transportation and land use—one of the foundational concepts of modern urban planning. Where you place transit shapes where people live, work, and build. A ferry stop is not just a dock; it is a statement about which neighborhoods deserve connection, investment, and growth.

1 Vanderbilt Ave, Manhattan

One Vanderbilt, the 1,401-foot supertall office tower next to Grand Central Terminal, is the crown jewel of the East Midtown Rezoning—a 2017 zoning change that was specifically designed to encourage the construction of next-generation office towers in the aging Midtown East commercial district. The building, developed by SL Green and designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, is topped by a tapered crown equipped with 20,000 multi-colored LED lights that can be programmed to display patterns visible from miles away.

The East Midtown Rezoning recognized a problem that had been brewing for decades: Midtown's office stock was aging, and the existing zoning made it economically infeasible to replace 1950s-era buildings with the kind of large-floorplate, high-tech towers that major corporate tenants now demanded. The rezoning created a framework of density bonuses tied to public realm improvements—developers could build bigger in exchange for upgrading subway infrastructure, creating public spaces, and improving pedestrian circulation.

One Vanderbilt delivered on that bargain in spectacular fashion. The building's developers invested over $200 million in transit improvements, including a new underground connection to Grand Central and a below-grade pedestrian hall. The observation deck, SUMMIT One Vanderbilt, has become one of the city's most popular attractions. The building demonstrates that zoning, when wielded creatively, can produce outcomes that serve both private profit and public good—though the balance between those interests remains, as always, a matter of perspective.

Long Island City, Queens

Anable Basin, a small inlet along the Long Island City waterfront in Queens, achieved national notoriety in 2018 when Amazon announced it would build its HQ2 on the surrounding blocks—a plan that collapsed within months under a barrage of community opposition, political maneuvering, and concerns about public subsidies for the world's richest company. The basin sits at the southern edge of a 54-block area that has since been the subject of a different, more democratic development process.

On November 12, 2025, the City Council approved the Innovation QNS rezoning, one of the largest neighborhood rezonings in recent city history. The plan paves the way for more than 14,700 new housing units—approximately 25 percent of them affordable—along with commercial space, new schools, and infrastructure improvements. The rezoning was the product of years of community engagement, environmental review, and political negotiation, a process that stood in stark contrast to the backroom deal-making that characterized the Amazon debacle.

The Anable Basin area encapsulates the contemporary challenges of urban development in New York. It is a place where industrial heritage, waterfront access, transit proximity, housing demand, and community identity all collide. The Innovation QNS rezoning attempts to balance these competing interests through the blunt instrument of zoning—a set of rules and numbers that will shape the physical form of the neighborhood for generations. Whether it succeeds will depend not just on the rules themselves but on the vigilance of the community in holding developers and the city accountable.

Brooklyn, NY

Brooklyn's waterfront has undergone more rezoning activity than perhaps any other stretch of coastline in the United States. From the Greenpoint-Williamsburg rezoning of 2005 to the Gowanus rezoning of 2019, the borough's former industrial shoreline has been systematically reimagined as a corridor of high-density residential development, public parks, and mixed-use projects. Each rezoning has produced its own architecture, its own controversies, and its own set of broken and kept promises.

The pattern is remarkably consistent: an underused industrial waterfront parcel is identified, the city proposes a rezoning to residential or mixed-use, community boards negotiate for affordable housing and public amenities, the rezoning is approved, and towers rise. The resulting neighborhoods bear a family resemblance—glass towers on podiums, ground-floor retail, waterfront esplanades—that critics deride as generic and defenders praise as efficient.

This particular site is part of that ongoing transformation. It represents the latest chapter in a story that has been unfolding for two decades: the conversion of Brooklyn's working waterfront into a residential one. The question of what was lost in that conversion—industrial jobs, neighborhood character, affordability—remains as contentious as ever. But the physical transformation is irreversible. The zoning map has been redrawn, and the buildings that follow will stand for a century or more.

Lincoln Center, Manhattan

In 1969, the city created its very first Special Purpose District around Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the 16.3-acre cultural campus on the Upper West Side whose first venue—Philharmonic Hall, now David Geffen Hall—had opened in 1962. The Special Lincoln Square District was crafted to encourage the concentration of cultural facilities, limit building height in the immediate vicinity of the campus, and improve pedestrian flow between the center's theaters, opera house, and concert halls.

The creation of a Special Purpose District was a novel concept. Unlike standard zoning, which applies uniform rules to broad swaths of the city, an SPD tailors regulations to the specific needs and character of a particular area. The Lincoln Square District recognized that a world-class performing arts center required something more nuanced than off-the-shelf commercial or residential zoning—it needed rules that would protect sightlines, control the scale of neighboring development, and ensure that the surrounding streets functioned as a cultural precinct rather than just another stretch of Broadway.

The success of the Lincoln Square SPD established a template that the city would use again and again. Today, New York has more than 60 Special Purpose Districts, governing everything from the signage in Times Square to the building heights along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Each one is a bespoke set of rules written for a specific place, a recognition that the city's extraordinary diversity demands extraordinary zoning flexibility. Lincoln Center was where that idea was born.

Staten Island, NY

The Special West Shore District, established in 2021, represents one of the city's most ambitious attempts to reimagine a major industrial area for a twenty-first-century economy. The West Shore of Staten Island is home to some of the borough's largest remaining industrial parcels—formerly the domain of oil storage tanks, distribution centers, and the kind of heavy industry that has been steadily departing the city for decades.

The SPD was designed to spur the evolution of this industrial hub by allowing a more diverse mix of uses while facilitating 4.2 million square feet of new development. The new rules permit light manufacturing alongside commercial and limited residential uses, creating a framework for the kind of hybrid economy that planners believe represents the future of urban industrial districts: maker spaces alongside offices, logistics alongside retail, production alongside consumption.

Staten Island's relationship with the rest of the city has always been ambivalent, and the West Shore SPD reflects that tension. The borough's residents have historically resisted the density and intensity of development that characterize the other boroughs. The West Shore district attempts to thread the needle: enabling significant new development while maintaining the low-rise, open character that Staten Islanders value. The NYC Ferry Homeport, where the scavenger hunt asks you to take a photograph, symbolizes the connection between this evolving district and the larger city it serves.

Times Square, Manhattan

Times Square is one of the only places in America where you are legally required to be loud. The Midtown Special Purpose District, created in 1982, includes a sub-district specifically for Times Square that mandates illuminated signage on all new development. The regulation was a deliberate attempt to codify the area's essential character: its identity as a spectacle of light and commerce. In a city where most zoning rules tell you what you cannot do, Times Square's zoning tells you what you must.

The 1982 SPD was created at a moment when Times Square's survival as an entertainment district was genuinely in doubt. The area had become synonymous with the urban decay of the 1970s: peep shows, drug dealing, and the kind of street-level vice that had driven legitimate businesses and theaters to the brink of extinction. The SPD's illuminated signage requirement was one piece of a larger strategy to attract corporate investment while preserving the kinetic visual energy that had defined the crossroads since the early twentieth century.

The strategy worked—perhaps too well. The Times Square of today bears almost no resemblance to its 1970s incarnation: the porn theaters have been replaced by flagship retail, the flophouses by luxury hotels, and the hustlers by tourists in Elmo costumes. The mandatory signage rule survives, producing the LED canyon of advertisements that is now the most visited destination in the Western Hemisphere. Times Square is proof that zoning does not merely regulate space—it can create identity.

Brooklyn, NY

Brooklyn is home to several Special Purpose Districts, each designed to address the unique challenges and opportunities of a particular neighborhood. These districts represent the city's recognition that standard zoning categories—residential, commercial, manufacturing—are often too blunt to manage the complex dynamics of Brooklyn's rapidly evolving communities. An SPD allows the city to write rules that are specific to a place: controlling building heights on a particular block, mandating ground-floor retail along a specific corridor, or preserving the scale of a historic district.

The proliferation of SPDs in Brooklyn reflects the borough's extraordinary pace of change. Neighborhoods that were predominantly industrial or working-class a generation ago have been transformed by waves of residential development, gentrification, and cultural reinvention. Each transformation has been shaped—and in some cases driven—by zoning changes, and SPDs have been one of the primary tools for managing those changes.

The challenge with SPDs is that they add layers of complexity to an already byzantine zoning code. Each district has its own rules, its own exceptions, and its own political history. Developers, community groups, and even city planners can struggle to navigate the overlapping requirements of a standard zoning district, a Special Purpose District overlay, and the site-specific conditions attached to individual development approvals. The result is a regulatory landscape that is extraordinarily detailed but also extraordinarily difficult to understand—a set of rules that, true to the scavenger hunt's title, are hidden between the lines.

Grand Concourse, Bronx

The building known colloquially as the "Fish Building" on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx is instantly recognizable by its fanciful aquatic mosaic murals—shimmering fish, seahorses, and underwater scenes rendered in tile on its facade. The building is one of the most visible landmarks along the Grand Concourse, the 5.2-mile boulevard that Bronx Borough President Louis Risse designed in 1894 as the borough's answer to the Champs-Elysées.

The Grand Concourse experienced its golden age in the 1920s and 1930s, when a wave of Art Deco apartment buildings rose along its length, catering to middle-class Jewish families moving north from Manhattan's Lower East Side. These buildings—with their decorative lobbies, terrazzo floors, and stylized facades—represent one of the finest concentrations of Art Deco residential architecture in the world. By the 1970s, however, the Concourse had fallen into steep decline, and many of its architectural treasures were threatened with neglect or demolition.

In 1989, the city created the Special Grand Concourse Preservation District to protect the boulevard's unique Jazz Age character. The SPD regulates building height, mandates contextual design for new construction, and limits alterations to existing Art Deco buildings. It was one of the first SPDs created explicitly for preservation rather than development—a recognition that zoning could be used not just to shape the future but to protect the past. The Fish Building, with its whimsical mosaics, survives because someone drew a line on a map and said: this matters.

High Line, Manhattan

The High Line—a 1.45-mile elevated park built on a disused freight rail line on Manhattan's West Side—is perhaps the most celebrated adaptive reuse project in the world. But the park's existence required a zoning intervention as creative as its design. The Special West Chelsea District, established in 2005, was crafted specifically to facilitate the High Line's preservation and transformation while managing the explosive development that the park would inevitably attract.

The SPD created a transfer corridor for development rights, allowing property owners along the High Line to sell their unused air rights to receiving sites on nearby avenues. This mechanism accomplished two goals: it gave High Line-adjacent property owners an economic alternative to demolishing the structure for new development, and it directed new density to avenues that could absorb taller buildings without overwhelming the park's intimate scale. The result was a carefully orchestrated dance of preservation and development that produced both the park and the forest of starchitect-designed residential towers that now line its route.

The West Chelsea SPD is widely cited as one of the most successful Special Purpose Districts in the city's history. It preserved a piece of industrial infrastructure, created a world-class public amenity, generated billions of dollars in real estate development, and transformed a gritty meatpacking and warehouse district into one of the most desirable neighborhoods in the city. Whether that transformation has been entirely positive—the displacement of longtime residents, the loss of affordable studio space for artists, the homogenization of a once-diverse streetscape—is a question that the High Line's beauty cannot entirely obscure.

Bronx Point, Bronx

The Universal Hip Hop Museum, founded by music producer Rocky Bucano and currently slated to open in fall 2026, is rising at Bronx Point, a mixed-use development at the northern edge of the Special Harlem River Waterfront District. The museum will anchor the cultural identity of a neighborhood that gave birth to hip hop in the 1970s—a neighborhood that is now being physically remade through one of the most ambitious waterfront rezonings in the borough's history.

The Special Purpose District that governs this stretch of the Harlem River waterfront was created to transform a low-slung warehouse and parking lot district into a new residential community. The SPD mandates public waterfront access, controls building heights to maintain views of the river, and includes provisions for affordable housing and community facilities. The Hip Hop Museum was written into the plan as a cultural anchor—a deliberate attempt to ensure that new development would honor rather than erase the neighborhood's identity.

There is a deep irony in the fact that hip hop—an art form born from poverty, abandonment, and the creative energy of Black and Latino communities that the city had essentially written off—is now being memorialized in a museum made possible by a zoning change designed to attract private investment. The question is whether the museum will serve as a genuine community institution or as a cultural fig leaf for gentrification. Rocky Bucano has been emphatic that it will be the former. The neighborhood will be watching.

Downtown Flushing, Queens

The 30-story, 669-unit residential building that rises above Downtown Flushing is the tallest structure in a neighborhood that has been one of the most dynamic commercial centers in the city for over a century. Flushing's Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue corridors are the heart of the largest Chinatown in the Western Hemisphere—a bustling, polyglot district where Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and a dozen other languages compete for airspace alongside English.

The Special Downtown Flushing Transit Hub District, established in 2007 and expanded in 2025, was designed to manage the area's explosive growth while preserving its vibrant pedestrian character. The SPD allows increased density near the Flushing-Main Street transit hub—the terminus of the 7 train—while imposing strict requirements for ground-floor retail, wide sidewalks, and active street frontages. The goal is to accommodate new housing and commercial space without destroying the tight-grained, market-stall energy that makes Flushing unlike anywhere else in the city.

The 2025 expansion of the SPD reflects the continued intensification of development pressure in the area. Flushing has become one of the most sought-after locations for residential development in Queens, driven by both local demand and international investment. The tallest building in the neighborhood is a physical manifestation of that demand—and of the zoning framework that channels it upward rather than outward, concentrating density near transit while attempting to protect the street-level vitality that is Flushing's greatest asset.

Parkchester, Bronx

Parkchester is a city within a city: a 129-building, 12,271-unit residential complex in the east Bronx that was developed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and completed in 1942. Designed by the architectural firm of Richmond Shreve (of Empire State Building fame) and Andrew Eken, the development covers 129 acres and was, at the time of its construction, the largest privately financed housing development in the country. Its red-brick buildings are arranged around courtyards and green spaces, and its facades are adorned with terra cotta sculptures—whimsical animal figures, decorative medallions, and architectural ornaments that give the complex a distinctive character.

Parkchester is one of several "Special Planned Community Preservation Districts" in New York City, a zoning designation that protects the character of large-scale, pre-1961 planned residential developments. Other examples include Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan and Fresh Meadows in Queens. These districts recognize that planned communities represent a different kind of urbanism from the incremental, lot-by-lot development that characterizes most of the city—and that their coherence and quality depend on being maintained as integrated wholes.

The preservation designation protects Parkchester's open spaces, its uniform building heights, and its distinctive terra cotta sculptures from alteration or removal. It is a form of zoning that works by freezing a moment in time—preserving the vision of a mid-century planner against the market pressures that might otherwise erode it. In a city that constantly remakes itself, Parkchester endures as a reminder that some of New York's most successful neighborhoods were designed all at once, by a single hand, with a single vision.

Kingsbridge, Bronx

The Kingsbridge Armory in the northwest Bronx is one of the largest armories in the world: a cavernous, 750,000-square-foot brick fortress completed in 1917, with a drill hall so vast that it could comfortably hold the entirety of Madison Square Garden's arena floor. The building has been largely vacant since the 1990s, and its redevelopment has been the subject of nearly two decades of proposals, protests, and political maneuvering.

The land beneath the armory has been rezoned multiple times as different groups have attempted to unlock its potential. An early proposal for a shopping mall was defeated by community activists who demanded that any redevelopment include a living wage requirement for tenants—a demand that the Bloomberg administration rejected, killing the deal. Subsequent proposals for an ice sports center and various mixed-use projects have stalled for various reasons, from financing challenges to community opposition.

In late 2025, the latest rezoning established a Special Mixed-Use District for the armory site, a zoning framework designed to accommodate a complex blend of uses—potentially including affordable housing, commercial space, community facilities, and the preservation of the armory's historic structure. The Kingsbridge Armory is a case study in the difficulty of redeveloping large public sites in a city where every stakeholder has a veto: the community wants affordability, preservationists want the building saved, developers want financial viability, and politicians want credit. Zoning is the framework within which all of these competing demands must be reconciled.

Broad Channel, Queens

Broad Channel is one of the most improbable neighborhoods in New York City: a small island community in the middle of Jamaica Bay where houses are built on stilts above the water, boats are parked in driveways, and the nearest subway station feels like a portal between two different worlds. The neighborhood's vulnerability to flooding was always obvious, but it took Hurricane Sandy in 2012—which inundated the island and destroyed or damaged hundreds of homes—to force the city to confront the question of what should be built in places where the water will inevitably return.

In 2017, the city designated Broad Channel and several other low-lying coastal areas as Special Coastal Risk Districts, a new type of SPD created specifically in response to Sandy. These districts heavily restrict new residential development, limit lot coverage, require elevated construction, and encourage the preservation of open space that can absorb floodwaters. The rules effectively acknowledge that some parts of the city are too vulnerable to continue building on as if climate change were not happening.

The Broad Channel Coastal Risk District is a form of zoning that works by subtraction rather than addition: instead of enabling development, it restricts it. This is politically difficult in a city with a severe housing shortage, but the alternative—continuing to build in flood zones and subsidizing the inevitable damage—is fiscally and morally untenable. Broad Channel's stilt houses, once a charming eccentricity, now look like prescient adaptations to a future that is arriving faster than anyone planned for.

Lower Manhattan

The City of Yes initiative, launched by the Adams administration, represents one of the most sweeping modifications to New York City's zoning resolution in decades. The initiative comprises three distinct but related components: Housing Opportunity, Economic Opportunity, and Carbon Neutrality. Together, they aim to modernize a zoning code that, despite countless amendments, still reflects many of the assumptions of 1961—an era when the city was losing population, manufacturing was a major employer, and climate change was not a consideration.

This Lower Manhattan waterfront site illustrates the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity provisions, which include expanded public access requirements for new waterfront development. The legislation mandates wider esplanades, more visual and physical connections to the water, and design standards that ensure waterfront public spaces are genuinely inviting rather than merely compliant. In a city where the waterfront was, for most of the twentieth century, a working industrial edge off-limits to the public, these requirements continue a decades-long transformation.

The City of Yes is significant not just for what it changes but for how it changes it. Unlike the site-specific rezonings that have characterized most of the city's recent zoning activity, City of Yes applies citywide—modifying the underlying rules rather than drawing new lines on the map. This approach has the potential to produce change at a scale that individual rezonings cannot match, but it also generates opposition from communities that prefer to negotiate their own terms rather than accept a one-size-fits-all framework.

Queens, NY

The conversion of a 12-story former Hilton hotel into 100 percent affordable housing in Queens represents one of the most promising strategies in the City of Yes toolkit: the adaptive reuse of obsolete commercial buildings for residential purposes. Hotels, in particular, are well-suited to conversion—their room layouts can be adapted into small apartments, their plumbing and HVAC systems can be repurposed, and their locations, typically near transit and commercial corridors, align with the city's goals for transit-oriented housing development.

The redevelopment of this building included the commissioning of the borough's tallest murals, painted by local artist Danielle Mastrion. The murals are not merely decorative—they represent a deliberate effort to integrate the building into its community, to signal that affordable housing is not a concession but an amenity. The building's transformation from a commercial hotel serving transient visitors to a permanent home for residents who might otherwise be priced out of the city is a small but meaningful reversal of the displacement that has characterized much of New York's recent development.

The City of Yes for Housing Opportunity encourages more conversions of this kind by relaxing the zoning restrictions that have historically made hotel-to-residential conversions difficult or impossible. Under the old rules, many commercial buildings sat in zones where residential use was prohibited, creating a paradox: empty commercial space in a city desperate for housing. City of Yes addresses this by allowing more flexible conversions, a pragmatic recognition that the city's housing crisis requires creative solutions, not ideological purity about land-use categories.

Staten Island, NY

The City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality includes provisions to encourage mass timber construction—an emerging building technology that uses engineered wood products like cross-laminated timber (CLT) to construct mid-rise and even high-rise buildings. Mass timber has a significantly lower embodied carbon footprint than steel or concrete, the materials that have dominated New York construction for over a century. By easing zoning restrictions on mass timber, the city is attempting to open the door to a building material that could meaningfully reduce the carbon impact of new construction.

Staten Island, with its lower density and greater availability of developable land, is a natural testing ground for mass timber construction. The borough's building stock is dominated by wood-frame single-family homes, and the construction industry on the island is more accustomed to working with wood than the high-rise builders of Manhattan or Brooklyn. Mass timber mid-rise buildings—five to eight stories—could provide a new housing typology for the borough: denser than single-family homes but lighter and faster to build than concrete towers.

The zoning changes that enable mass timber are technical but consequential. Previous regulations effectively limited wood construction to low-rise buildings, reflecting fire safety concerns rooted in the nineteenth century. Modern mass timber, however, performs surprisingly well in fire tests—the thick wood members char on the outside, forming a protective layer that insulates the structural core. By updating the zoning code to reflect this reality, City of Yes removes a regulatory barrier to a technology that could help the city meet its climate goals while building housing faster and at lower cost.

Stuyvesant Cove, Manhattan

Solar One, the environmental education center at Stuyvesant Cove on Manhattan's East Side, has been redesigned by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) as a new riverfront facility that embodies the principles of the City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality. The nonprofit, whose mission centers on sustainability education and solar energy advocacy, is a natural anchor for the legislation's provisions on renewable energy, which significantly ease the zoning restrictions that have historically made it difficult to install solar panels, wind turbines, and other renewable energy equipment on buildings across the city.

Under the old zoning rules, solar panels were subject to the same height and setback restrictions as the buildings on which they were installed. A rooftop solar array that extended above the maximum permitted building height was technically a zoning violation, regardless of its environmental benefits. City of Yes for Carbon Neutrality eliminates these barriers, treating renewable energy installations as permitted obstructions—similar to how the code already treats water tanks, elevator bulkheads, and cell towers.

The change is deceptively simple but potentially transformative. New York City has enormous untapped solar potential on its rooftops, but installation rates have been hampered by a combination of zoning restrictions, permitting complexity, and economic barriers. By removing the zoning obstacles, City of Yes clears one lane of the regulatory highway, making it faster and cheaper to put solar on rooftops across the five boroughs. Solar One's new BIG-designed facility will serve as both a demonstration project and an educational resource for a city that is beginning, belatedly, to take its own climate commitments seriously.

Citywide

The City of Yes for Economic Opportunity addresses one of the most visible symptoms of New York's regulatory sclerosis: vacant storefronts. Walk any commercial corridor in the city and you will see them—shuttered shops, papered-over windows, and "for lease" signs that have been up so long they have faded in the sun. The reasons for vacancy are complex, involving rent levels, e-commerce competition, and commercial lease dynamics. But zoning has been a significant contributor, imposing use restrictions that prevent landlords from filling empty spaces with willing tenants.

Under the old rules, many storefronts were limited to specific use categories—a space zoned for retail could not become a gym, a space zoned for a restaurant could not become a co-working space, and converting a commercial space to a community facility required lengthy approvals. City of Yes for Economic Opportunity relaxes these restrictions, allowing a broader range of uses in ground-floor commercial spaces and streamlining the approval process for changes of use.

The scavenger hunt's bonus challenge—to photograph your team making a purchase at a storefront that has opened within the past 12 months—is a celebration of the entrepreneurial energy that City of Yes aims to unleash. Every new storefront represents a bet on a neighborhood, an investment of capital and labor in a physical space at a time when the conventional wisdom says that brick-and-mortar is dying. The zoning changes will not, by themselves, fill every vacant storefront. But they remove one of the barriers that has kept willing tenants out of willing spaces.

Brooklyn Waterfront

This Brooklyn waterfront site, with its 54,800 square feet of publicly accessible waterfront space, represents the convergence of two major trends in New York City zoning: the ongoing conversion of industrial waterfronts to mixed-use development, and the City of Yes initiative's emphasis on public access and environmental quality. The amount of public space on this site would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when Brooklyn's waterfront was a working industrial edge dominated by warehouses, fuel depots, and waste transfer stations.

The transformation of the city's industrial waterfront is one of the great urban planning stories of the past half-century. For most of the twentieth century, zoning actively kept people away from the water, designating shoreline areas as manufacturing zones where public access was neither required nor desired. The decline of waterfront industry created an opportunity: as factories and warehouses closed, the city began rezoning these parcels for residential and commercial use, often with requirements for public waterfront access.

City of Yes builds on this legacy by establishing more rigorous and specific requirements for waterfront public space. The legislation goes beyond simply requiring access—it mandates design standards, minimum dimensions, and programming requirements intended to ensure that waterfront spaces are genuinely useful to the public rather than serving as tokenistic compliance. In a city where the waterfront was, within living memory, one of the most polluted and inaccessible landscapes in the country, 54,800 square feet of public space on a single site is a measure of how far the pendulum has swung.

Sunnyside, Queens

Sunnyside Yards is one of New York City's great what-ifs: a 180-acre rail yard in western Queens that represents perhaps the largest undeveloped site within sight of the Manhattan skyline. The yard, owned by Amtrak, serves as a storage and maintenance facility for Long Island Rail Road trains. Its sheer size—equivalent to roughly 130 city blocks—has made it the subject of development speculation for decades, with proposals ranging from the modest to the megalomaniacal.

The most recent feasibility study, completed in 2017, found that the site could support more than 24,000 housing units if it were fully decked over—a massive platform constructed above the active rail lines, similar to what was done at Hudson Yards on Manhattan's West Side. The estimated cost of decking alone exceeded $10 billion, a figure that has made even the most ambitious developers blanch. The engineering challenges are formidable: the platform would need to support buildings while allowing trains to continue operating below, and the ventilation, structural, and safety requirements are daunting.

Sunnyside Yards represents the frontier of what zoning might someday enable. The site has no current zoning for development—it is mapped as a transportation facility—and any construction would require a complete rezoning, environmental review, and public approval process that would take years. But the site's proximity to transit, its scale, and the city's insatiable appetite for housing make some form of development feel inevitable. The question is not whether Sunnyside Yards will be built on, but when, and for whom.

Red Hook, Brooklyn

The Red Hook Container Terminal, a 122-acre site on Brooklyn's southwestern waterfront, has been approved for one of the most ambitious rezonings in the city's recent history: the transformation of an aging maritime facility into a modernized, all-electric port alongside a new mixed-use residential community. The project represents a rare attempt to preserve working waterfront infrastructure while simultaneously building housing—two goals that have traditionally been seen as incompatible.

For decades, the conventional wisdom held that residential development and port operations could not coexist. The noise, truck traffic, and industrial character of a working port were considered incompatible with the needs of residents. Red Hook's rezoning challenges that assumption, proposing a design that integrates a state-of-the-art electric port—eliminating diesel emissions from ship-to-shore operations—with residential towers, public parks, and commercial space. The electrification is key: by eliminating the pollution that made ports bad neighbors, the project argues that industry and housing can share the waterfront.

The Red Hook rezoning is significant for what it represents about the future of New York's waterfront. After two decades of converting industrial shoreline to housing, the city is beginning to reckon with the consequences of deindustrializing its edge. Ports, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities provide jobs and economic diversity that housing alone cannot replace. Red Hook's hybrid model—a port and a neighborhood, industry and community, work and home—may offer a template for the next generation of waterfront development. It is zoning as synthesis, an attempt to move beyond the binary choices that have defined the city's waterfront battles for a generation.