Lafayette Street to the Bowery, Broome Street to East Houston
City Planning's SoHo/NoHo environmental study says Nolita "is generally bounded by Lafayette Street and the Bowery, and Broome and East Houston Streets", and describes it as "overwhelmingly mixed-use, containing four- to six-story residential buildings with ground-floor retail" (FEIS chapter 2). The study lists the 0.27-acre DeSalvio Playground and the NYPL Mulberry Street Branch at 10 Jersey Street among its public places. The Landmarks Preservation Commission notes the name in a 2010 report: "The northern section of historic Little Italy is now referred to as NoLiTa" (LP-2412). The blocks between Broome Street and Canal Street are covered on the Little Italy page.
Old St. Patrick's and its buildings
The FEIS places "St. Patrick's Old Cathedral" at 263 Mulberry Street, "with an adjacent cemetery garden". The Commission designated Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, at Mott Street and Prince Street, on June 21, 1966; its report dates the church as begun 1809 and completed 1815 (LP-0187). The Commission's report on St. Michael's Chapel records that the cathedral itself was extensively damaged by fire on October 6, 1866, then rebuilt and rededicated on March 17, 1868 (LP-0961). Two related buildings carry designations of their own:
- Old St. Patrick's Convent and Girls' School, 32 Prince Street: completed 1826 and designated June 21, 1966. The report describes a three-story Late Federal brick building with an attic and low basement, and records that in 1886 the wing at Prince and Mott was remodeled from an orphan asylum into a school (LP-0186).
- St. Michael's Chapel of Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, 266 Mulberry Street: built 1858–59 as a chancery office, designed by James Renwick, Jr., with William Rodrigue, and designated July 12, 1977 (LP-0961).
On Mott Street and along the Bowery
The Fourteenth Ward Industrial School at 256-258 Mott Street, built 1888–89 by Vaux & Radford, was designated July 12, 1977 (LP-0960). Two designated buildings stand on the Bowery itself, and their reports tell a Bowery story rather than a neighborhood one: the former Young Men's Institute Building at 222 Bowery, built 1884–85 by Bradford L. Gilbert and designated November 17, 1998 (LP-2028), and the former Germania Bank Building at 190 Bowery, on the northwest corner of the Bowery and Spring Street, built 1898–99 by Robert Maynicke and designated March 29, 2005 (LP-2162). As individual landmarks, all of them need a Commission permit before exterior work begins (LPC).
Zoning that reaches these blocks
The Special Little Italy District is mapped across these blocks. It is set out in Zoning Resolution Article X, Chapter 9 (ZR Article X, Chapter 9). One of its subdistricts, Area B, carries the name "Houston Street Corridor" (Section 109-30); East Houston Street is also the northern line in City Planning's description. The chapter's Appendix B names Buildings of Special Significance; for a building on that list, changes to the external architectural features are allowed only as Section 109-52 provides, and exterior-alteration and demolition permits are held to the same section. A buyer planning a storefront, window or cornice change should check the list against the address.
Heat and the six-story line
The FEIS's four- to six-story description matters for records. The city's facade inspection program applies to buildings "higher than six stories" (FISP), so a building of six stories or fewer files no five-year facade report and leaves the buyer no DOB facade rating to read; ask the board or owner directly about parapets, fire escapes, lintels and pointing. Heat follows a family count rather than a story count: the DOB's yearly low-pressure boiler inspection applies to residential buildings of six or more families, and leaves out buildings of up to five families, boilers that each serve a single apartment, and any boiler of 100,000 BTUs input or less (boiler inspections). In a small walk-up that can mean no annual boiler record at all, which makes the building's own service history the thing to request.
Inside a walk-up apartment
A unit inspection stays inside the apartment: the electrical panel and its circuits, outlets and fixtures; kitchen and bathroom fixtures along with any supply and drain piping in view; windows, including any onto a light shaft; the heating and cooling equipment that serves the unit; exhaust fans and ventilation; and marks on ceilings or walls that show water from the apartment above or from outside. Older walk-ups typically carry gas and water risers shared by several apartments, and those runs beyond the unit, like the roof, the cellar and the building's budget, are for the board and the filings.
Trains, flood labels and the shared count
No station point in the MTA list (data.ny.gov) falls within City Planning's bounds: Spring St (6) is under Lafayette Street on the western edge, Bowery (J Z) is on the eastern edge, and Broadway-Lafayette St (B D F M) is at Houston and Lafayette. On FEMA's effective and preliminary maps (effective NFHL, preliminary NFHL) the Special Little Italy District carries a Zone X label, which does not mean a building cannot flood; the same official area contains AE zones. A single building's zone comes from entering its street address at FEMA's Flood Map Service Center. Tax-lot figures for the SoHo-Little Italy-Hudson Square area, which takes in NoLIta, sit on the SoHo page.