While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the building permits of the nineteenth century represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.
It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.
[Update 12.31.2009: This information reposted from Dartmo.com.]
[Update 05.31.2010: A favorite way to search for specific individual or address is by using Columbia’s copies of the Record & Guide. Type this into Google to learn about 101 West 97th:
"97th st., no. 101" "real estate record" site:www.columbia.edu
The address takes some fiddling to account for boundary-based descriptions and OCR misspellings:
97th st., s s
should narrow things down. Also try
97th street, no. 101
and
101 west 97th
Google ignores the punctuation and line breaks. Most programs’ “find” commands do not ignore these features, so searching the Record & Guide via Google will turn up information that would be missed in a search of only the text files or the pdf downloads.]
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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to search page below fixed.]
[Update 04.10.2011: This post notes that the Avery Library’s search page is now up.]