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Manhattan News



STALLED CONDO TOWER NEAR WALL STREET DOESN’T JUST TILT — FDNY DECLARED IT A
HAZARD


A STANDPIPE AT 161 MAIDEN LANE WAS OUT OF COMMISSION FOR MORE THAN A YEAR,
CUTTING OFF WATER SUPPLY NEEDED TO FIGHT HIGH-RISE FIRES.

By  Greg B. Smith  gsmith@thecity.nyc
, May 16, 2023 05:00 AM
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Construction has stalled at the glass-tower residential development at 161
Maiden Lane near the South Street Seaport.

 | 

Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

On a warm summer day last July, Fire Department inspectors entered a 58-story
half-built skeleton of a tower in Lower Manhattan that was supposed to contain
luxury condos with stunning views of New York harbor and all the high-end
amenities affluent buyers expect.

Instead, four years after it was first scheduled to open, the promised upscale
high-rise remained an empty hulk, its upper floors open to the elements, most of
its glass wall exterior yet to be installed.

This was 161 Maiden Lane — shut down by its owner midway through construction
after the discovery that the entire structure leans slightly to the north.

What the fire inspectors discovered inside the so-called Leaning Tower of Lower
Manhattan was alarming: a fire suppression system — a standpipe that provides
firefighters with immediate access to water from top to bottom of the building —
was not functioning.

Without a standpipe — which is essentially an extension of a fire hydrant — if a
fire broke out on an upper floor in the abandoned structure, it would be
extremely difficult to put it out. On top of that, inspectors discovered the
required fire-watch employees were no longer on site to make sure no one could
enter the building and potentially start a fire inside.

And according to a temporary receiver appointed by a court to manage the
building while lawsuits continue over who’s to blame for the building’s tilt,
161 Maiden Lane had been without a working standpipe for more than a year when
the FDNY showed up to inspect it.



The receiver, Richard Cohn, told THE CITY that the problem with the standpipe
began after a homeless person broke into the half-built structure sometime
before he was sworn in as receiver in June 2021. Cohn said the person turned on
the motor that powers the standpipe to generate heat, which broke the motor and
disabled the standpipe.

Richard Bamberger, a spokesperson for the building’s owner, Fortis Building
Group LLC, told THE CITY, “We are not aware of any problem with the standpipe
when the receiver took over.” 

But there was a significant gap in FDNY inspections, starting around the time
the receiver began managing the building. While inspectors had found the
standpipe functioning throughout 2020 and into May 2021 before Cohn showed up,
they weren’t able to gain access to the building and check the standpipe for
more than a year after that, according to FDNYspokesperson James Long.

And when they did in July 2022, they found the standpipe was out of order.


FIRE WARNING

The importance of a working standpipe on a high-rise building project became
apparent to all of New York City in August 2007.

That’s when a non-functioning standpipe contributed to a disastrous fire in the
upper floors of the empty Deutsche Bank tower, a 39-story building that had been
damaged on Sept. 11 and was being demolished. Two firefighters died and 100 were
injured after firefighters could not quickly get water up to the floors where
the fire started.

The FDNY’s Long made clear the importance of a working standpipe in high-rise
buildings: “If there’s an actual fire, you have to work that much harder to get
hose lengths and ladders on the upper floors. You need that much more manpower.
In that time, the fire can grow and expand.”

Given that history, on July 8, 2022, the FDNY declared 161 Maiden Lane to be a
670-foot-tall fire hazard, requesting an immediate inspection by the Department
of Buildings regarding a “major building with no standpipe nor fire watch,”
according to building department records.

The FDNY stated that the job site was “open and accessible to public … and no
watch person on site as required.” DOB inspectors showed up and discovered all
three gauges of the building’s standpipe were “zeroed out,” meaning there was
“no pressure with the system” to bring water to the upper floors if necessary,
records show.

Many floors at 161 Maiden Lane remain exposed.

 | 

Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

DOB issued a Class 1 hazardous code violation deemed “aggravated offense level
1” for the standpipe and levied a $25,000 penalty. A second Class 1 hazardous
violation for the missing-in-action fire watch person triggered a $2,500 fine.

Speaking with THE CITY, the receiver blamed delays in fixing the standpipe on a
broken hoist inside the building that was needed to bring a replacement motor to
an upper floor.

“The standpipe was compromised, but it needed materials to be installed because
the hoist was not working,” said Cohn. “It’s been a tremendous effort to get
things stable at the building.”

In mid-September, after the hoist was finally back in service, DOB inspectors
determined that the standpipe had been restored and the fire watch employee was
back on site.

“The situation has been resolved,” Cohn said.



Records indicate that Fortis paid the fire watch fine, but the standpipe fine —
which records state was issued to “Unavailable owner” — remained unpaid as of
last week. No one affiliated with 161 Maiden Lane showed up at a Dec. 31 hearing
before the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH) to resolve
it. As a result, the penalty will likely be even higher than $25,000.

“The owners of a stalled work site have a legal responsibility to properly
maintain the property in a safe condition,” DOB spokesperson Andrew Rudansky
told THE CITY, noting that the department regularly visits 161 Maiden Lane to
make sure the owners are complying with all applicable safety regulations. An
April inspection found no violations and more checks are set for “the near
future.”


VERTICAL GHOST TOWN

The useless standpipe was hardly the only safety issue at 161 Maiden Lane, an
ambitious development that first went off the rails five years ago and now sits
unfinished on the East River waterfront, a symbol of what can go wrong in the
rush to make a profit off valuable Manhattan real estate.

Calamity struck the site even before work stopped there. In 2016, a 43-year-old
laborer, Juan Chonillo, fell 29 stories to his death during the concrete pour.
His employer, SSC High Rise Inc., pleaded guilty to manslaughter charges and
paid $842,000 in restitution for failing to ensure the job site was safe.

A review by THE CITY of emails, affidavits and building department records filed
in connection with multiple pending lawsuits about who is to blame for the
structure’s troubled state reveals that the building’s unexpected tilt has
raised safety concerns that go beyond a non-functioning fire suppression system.

The saga began at ground level in 2014 with a geotechnical design firm hired by
Fortis Building Group, RA Engineer LLP, that made recommendations about the
massive building’s foundation.

RA first recommended driving piles deep into the Manhattan bedrock lying beneath
the landfill deposited there starting in the 19th century, which makes up much
of the East River’s shoreline. All of the buildings around 161 Maiden Lane
relied on this pile-driving technique for support, and RA declared that building
settlement and movement would be negligible with a pile-driven foundation.

But RA also offered Fortis a less expensive alternative: injecting chemicals
into the soil to harden the fill. RA declared this method was “technically
feasible,” with the caveat that the developer could expect two-inch settlement
during construction, with an additional one inch once the building was complete
and occupied. This is the method Fortis adopted.

Department of Buildings records indicate the agency received documents regarding
a soil inspection in September 2014 and approved the foundation plan on Oct. 1,
2015.

But by summer 2019, Fortis publicly acknowledged that 161 Maiden Lane was now
tilting to the north by three inches before the building was even finished.

Fortis’ architect, WSP USA, claimed this was a “manageable” degree. But Thornton
Tomasetti, an engineering firm hired by the project’s construction manager,
Pizzarotti LLC, asserted that the tilt was even worse than that, leaning by four
inches even before the full weight of an occupied building was in place.

“The [settlement] values predicted have been exceeded already and the full dead
load of the building has not yet been added and the building occupants have not
yet moved in,” according to Elisabeth Malsch, a licensed engineer and senior
principal at Tomasetti. “The ongoing movement of the top of the building long
after top-out suggests that this long-term creep behavior is far more
significant than the short-term movement that occurred during pauses in
construction.

“Additional movement will occur as work progresses,” Malsch warned.

In its lawsuit, Fortis blamed Pizzarotti. As the architect, WSP USA insisted the
chemical injection method was not an issue and instead charged that Pizzarotti
did not properly oversee the concrete pour at the site and failed to maintain
“plumbness,” or straighness, as the building rose upward. That, WSP contended,
was the reason for the excessive tilt.

In its suit against Fortis, Pizzarotti placed the blame squarely on what it
deemed to be the design flaw caused by the decision not to pile drive the
foundation. (Both suits are pending.)

Pizzarotti’s lawsuit quoted an email by the project’s concrete subcontractor
first noticing the tilt in April 2018, describing what he said was “unusual
settlement” of the building. That June the subcontractor for the glass curtain
wall that sheaths the building’s exterior discovered the building’s wall frame
showed a two-inch difference to the north between the 11th and 21st floors.


‘SAFETY REMAINS A CONCERN’

By 2019, all work had stopped at the site. In an affidavit recommending that
work should not resume until the project could be redesigned, Malsch of Thornton
Tomasetti warned of dangerous conditions if work continued without a design
revamp.

“Safety remains a concern with respect to future work, particularly the
installation of the [glass] curtain wall,” she stated. “There is insufficient
information to assure that the building will remain safe if work advances
because the building continues to settle and there is no evidence that the
curtain wall has been properly re-designed to take the movement into account.”

The degree of lean could also result in “breaking windows and components falling
to the street,” which could “fall from a height of up to 58 stories down to the
street below, causing grave injury to persons and property,” Malsch stated.

Despite the discovery of the tilt, construction continued, with the building
topping out in fall 2018. When Pizzarotti sued Fortis in spring 2019, they
notified Fortis that work could not proceed until the building was redesigned.

Since then the building has remained a vertical ghost town. Most of the upper
floors remain open to the elements, and the billboard attached to the sidewalk
shed that advertises a summer 2021 opening is now scarred with graffiti.

Records also show that Fortis continued to sell 161 Maiden Lane condominium
apartments throughout 2018 and into 2019, long after the issue with the
building’s tilt had been brought to their attention.

At least two buyers of high-priced condos there have sued the developer,
alleging that Fortis deliberately misled them about the major defect in the
building.

Both buyers are also alleging that while Fortis refunded down payments on the
units, they’ve refused to return hundreds of thousands of dollars the purchasers
paid out toward apartment upgrades, claiming that the money has already been
spent.

One buyer, Linda Gerstman, closed on a $1.2 million 46th floor unit on Halloween
2018 — seven months after Fortis first learned that the building was tilting
northward. Fortis didn’t let Gerstman know about the project’s problems until
June 2019, the suit alleged.

Fortis refunded $900,000 to Gerstman but refused to return the remaining
$300,000, according to the suit, which alleges both fraud and breach of
contract. Fortis’ lawyers filed a counterclaim, denying the fraud allegation and
pointing to purchase agreement language that stated Gerstman “relied solely on
the purchaser’s own judgment and investigation” in signing the contract to buy
the condo.

In 2021, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engorom rejected Fortis’ motion
to toss the breach of contract allegation, but dismissed the fraud charge as
“redundant.” The suit is pending.

Gerstman’s attorney, Randy Kleinman, did not respond to THE CITY’s calls seeking
comment.

Carolyn Miu and other members of her New Jersey family made similar allegations
in a suit filed in August 2022, contending that Fortis knew of the building’s
tilt problem months before closing on the sale of two units for $854,040. Fortis
is refusing to return $103,200 of that, the Miu family alleged.

The Miu family’s attorney, Dennis Villasana, declined to comment. The suit is
pending.

On Friday Bamberger, speaking for Fortis, repeated the lawsuit’s claim that
Pizzarotti is to blame for the unexpected tilt, but said the building remains
“structurally stable.”

“We look forward to resolving these legal matters, making the appropriate
remedial measures, completing the building, and having residents enjoy this
great property,” Bamberger stated.


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