Not What It Seems

Sometimes, the Monopoly game that divided up New York’s lots left a small piece of land behind, and you get a strangely-narrow house as a result. This isn’t one of those cases. You’d have to be both very weird and looking to lose money to build a tenement on a lot that is 12 feet, 3 inches (per the city records) across. The reality is still weird but makes more sense: this block got stuck with a strange diagonal property line from some former, pre-street-grid ownership. The narrow-looking tenement, and its wide-looking neighbor, are actually both near-triangles in plan: