In the following passage, there are blanks each of which has been numbered.…

In the following passage, there are blanks each of which has been numbered. These correspond to the question numbers; against each question, five words have been suggested, one of which fills the blank appropriately.

The Sam Kee Building, located at 8 West Pender Street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, is (____1______) the "shallowest commercial building in the world", according to the Guinness Book of Records. The Sam Kee Company—one of the wealthiest firms in Chinatown— purchased a standard-sized lot in 1903. In 1912, however, Vancouver widened Pender Street and expropriated 24 feet (7.3 m) of the above-ground (____2______) —effectively (or so it was first believed) making conventional commercial use of the remaining frontage impractical, if not impossible. Refusing the neighbors offer to (____3_____), Sam Kee decided to build anyway. In 1913, the architects Brown and Gillam designed this narrow, steel-framed building's ground-floor depth (from storefront to rear of building) to measure 4'11" (1.50 m), with a second-floor depth (from overhanging bay window to rear) of 6' (1.83 m). The basement (_____4____) sidewalk and originally housed public baths, while the ground floor was used for offices and shops and the (_____5_____) for living quarters.

Choose the correct answer from the given options to fill the blanks which are numbered 2