If so, Berman, who had previously been celebrated for bringing conversions to the city that were, if not cheap, at least not pornographically expensive, was suddenly a potential J. Bruce Ismay. Buildings don\u2019t just typically fall over; someone, in all probability, made a mistake in building them. The Pfizer conversion used almost no organized labor, which did not make the unions happy; the only union workers on the site were the steamfitters, who immediately claimed that Berman skimped on steel. (He has called the charge \u201ctotal nonsense.\u201d) Scabby, the inflatable rat, quickly made an appearance at the site. The carpenters\u2019 union deployed a truck to the area with an electronic readout sign: \u201cCrime Scene,\u201d one message read. \u201c1,600 residential units at risk due to cutting corners.\u201d Another readout asserted \u201cShame on Metroloft.\u201d (Berman told me he would not comment on the Pfizer situation.)<\/p>\n
In the world of New York City real estate, Berman is prominent but neither famous nor infamous. Mike Vatter, of the Laborers\u2019 Union, told me that Berman was just \u201cone of many.\u201d And, although the current mayoral administration wants new units in old buildings, Berman\u2019s projects don\u2019t exactly fit neatly within the Zohran Mamdani mold. In 2024, as we toured his Wall Street conversions, he pointed out amenities such as swimming pools and well-stocked gyms\u2014luxe additions that had been planned for the Pfizer building as well. Creating housing for first-year associates at Goldman Sachs\u2014which is how Berman told me he conceptualizes his work\u2014qualifies you as a do-gooder only within the extraordinary economic microenvironment of Manhattan.<\/p>\n
But, anyway, renown wasn\u2019t what Berman sought, as he made clear when I wrote about him. For him, the puzzle of how to make money was what mattered\u2014he likened converting an office building into a residence to solving a Rubik\u2019s Cube. If the math didn\u2019t work, he hollowed out cores and used the leftovers to add floors on top until it did. Berman\u2019s passion for shoving as many units into as small a space as possible and then going big on plush facilities led one of his own architects to describe the developments to me as \u201cslums for the rich.\u201d He was unapologetic: \u201cIf the price per pound is right, I say, \u2018Let\u2019s go.\u2019\u00a0\u201d Berman was born in the Soviet Union, in 1959, and another of his business principles, he explained, was to try to avoid any deal that involved government, i.e., he would not get involved in a project that required a change in zoning regulations. \u201cLife is short,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Up until July 7th, none of this was a problem. But now, faced with a potential debacle on East Forty-second Street, Berman could have used a few friends\u2014city officials, union leaders, the kind you make when you put your name on an art museum. (Before turning to real estate, Berman worked at his father-in-law\u2019s art gallery.) It didn\u2019t help that when Berman stepped up to explain the problem, he made the mistake of free-associating in front of a reporter. \u201cThis incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,\u201d he told the Times, on Tuesday evening. \u201cIt happens, unfortunately, far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people\u2014God forbid\u2014falling off buildings, windows falling.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though attention immediately focussed on Berman, he wasn\u2019t the only possible malefactor by any means. A conversion of this size isn\u2019t a solo project. Berman isn\u2019t the only owner of the structure\u2014he shares that title with David Werner, known informally around the city as the King of Flips, whose sense of civic obligation makes Berman start to sound like a member of Mamdani\u2019s Democratic Socialists of America. And where was Gensler, the global design and planning firm that would have submitted the architectural drawings? Or the structural engineer, the well-known firm Goldstein Associates Consulting Engineers? And the layers of inspection oversight that a renovation like this gets from the private inspectors that it hires, and ultimately from the city? According to the Times,<\/a> which combed through \u201cmillions of rows of city violation records,\u201d the inspection firm hired for the project had a history of errors and violations on previous jobs, for which the city assessed fines, not all of which the company appeared to have paid. Previous problems with the Pfizer-building renovation also came to light in the press\u2014a fall off a ladder and objects that plummeted to the street below. Money, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, \u201cis not made in the light.\u201d New York City real estate sometimes resembles a basement crawl space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If so, Berman, who had previously been celebrated for bringing conversions to the city that were, if not…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[71333,14800,9,11,10,3273,51577,39671],"class_list":["post-293106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-construction-sites","tag-conversions","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-office-buildings","tag-structure","tag-towers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}