City Inspectors Halt Work at Lower Manhattan Office Conversion
The City’s Department of Buildings (DOB) has issued a full stop-work order at the former office tower at 222 Broadway (between Fulton and Ann Streets), which is being converted to residential use. (Editor’s note: This story was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.)
DOB spokesman Ryan Degan told The Broadsheet that a partial stop-work order was issued on July 11, when the agency’s inspectors became aware of two concrete beams on the 32nd floor of the building that had developed cracks. “Our inspectors observed that the cracked beams had already been repaired, with through rods installed in the concrete.” (This is a structural repair process in which metal components are used to clamp and stabilize cracked or heavily loaded concrete supports.)
“There was large steel plate strapping now fully encasing the beams,” Mr Degan continued. “This repair plan to wrap the concrete beams with steel was developed by the engineer of record for the site, DeSimone Consulting Engineering. Our inspectors were presented with documentation and an attestation letter from DeSimone indicating that they have found that the building is stable, and that there were no safety concerns at the site related to the beams.”
During the July 11 inspection, DOB inspectors “did not observe any conditions at the site that would necessitate a vacate order of the building, nor any additional DOB actions necessary to protect the public,” he added. This was a reference to emergency measures recently implemented in Midtown at another office-to-residential conversion project, where buckling steel beams triggered a evacuation for multiple blocks in every direction, based on fears that the 33-story building (to which multiple new floors are being added) might collapse.
Although the situation at 222 Broadway (to which one additional floor is being added, to accommodate a rooftop pool) was less dire than at the Midtown site, “it was determined that the contractors and engineers at the site did not notify us of the issue with the beams when they first became aware of it, and the change in plans for the repairs to the beams were not properly filed with the department, as required,” Mr. Degan said. “At the time, we asked DeSimone for additional engineering reports on how the cracks appeared. Over the next several weeks they provided us with additional documentation at our request.”
DOB engineers conducted a follow-up inspection on July 23, at which they “again asked for the complete package of engineering reports with additional information on how the cracks on the beams appeared,” said Mr. Degan. “While on site, our engineers upgraded the previously issued partial stop-work order to a full stop-work order, until we get the complete package of engineering documentation that proves it is safe for the work to proceed.
On July 24, a DeSimone engineer “sent over the remaining requested engineering reports, which are now currently being audited by DOB engineers,” Mr. Degan said. “Further enforcement actions are pending DOB audit of these documents. As is standard protocol for all full stop work orders, DOB will not lift the order at 222 Broadway until we are fully confident that it is safe to continue construction operations.”
(Editor’s note: DOB inspectors had also issued a partial stop-work order at another Lower Manhattan office-to-residential conversion—77 Water Street—on July 11, but this restriction was lifted several days later. The halts at 222 Broadway and 77 Water Street were part of what DOB calls “proactive enforcement inspections,” launched in the wake of the crisis at the Midtown conversion project.)
A spokesman for GFP Real Estate, the developer leading the conversion at 222 Broadway, said, “last week’s stop work order was issued over a DOB reporting timeline discrepancy in March for since-addressed work, not safety issues of any kind. Our structural engineers immediately identified and addressed this issue in March upon inspection, and we subsequently had the proposed repairs reviewed by a third-party structural inspector to ensure that it was safely completed. At no point during construction has the building’s stability been compromised. We will continue to follow DOB reporting rules and work closely with the Department as work on the project continues.” The spokesman added that the stability of the building was never compromised , and there was no risk to building occupants, the public, or surrounding buildings.
The former empty office tower at 222 Broadway was acquired by GFP in March 2024. The structure opened in 1962, as the corporate headquarters of Western Electric, the manufacturing subsidiary of AT&T, diagonally across the intersection of Broadway and Fulton Street from its parent company’s headquarters, at 195 Broadway. Western Electric sold the building two decades later, as the AT&T monopoly was poised to be sundered by federal anti-trust regulators.
In the next 40 years, the building passed through the hands of a succession of financial institutions, most recently Deutsche Bank, which bought 222 Broadway in 2014 for $500 million. Amid post-pandemic commercial real estate woes (spurred in part by the remote-work trend that led corporate employers to rethink their need for large suites of workspace), the value of office properties declined precipitously. This enabled real estate developer Jeffrey Gural (a principal in GFP) to purchase the building for $150 million, or a discount of two-thirds.
Under current zoning regulations, the three-quarters of a million square feet enclosed by the building will be reconfigured to create 798 apartments, branded as “the Wrey.” This is part of a wave of office-to-residential conversions washing over Lower Manhattan, with buildings like 25 Water Street (in which Mr. Gural was also a partner) recently converted to 1,600 apartments.
Mr. Gural’s firm, which is also repurposing another Lower Manhattan tower, 40 Exchange Place, into 382 rental apartments, was named by City Hall last year as the developer of 100 Gold Street, where plans call for a massive residential complex on a publicly owned, two-acre site. This project is expected to contain more than 3,700 new homes, of which some 925 are slated to be affordable units. No plans have been announced for any affordable units at 222 Broadway.
A recent analysis by the Downtown Alliance noted that Lower Manhattan currently has 37,283 units in 351 residential buildings, and there are another 8,987 apartments in 32 buildings now under construction or planned for development. Of these, slightly more than 7,500 units are office-to-residential conversions. The Alliance report cites multiple newly announced and ongoing conversions, in addition to 222 Broadway and 40 Exchange Place: 61 Broadway (with 796 apartments), 80 Broad Street (with 326 homes), 111 Wall Street (1,500), 80 Pine Street (713), 101 Greenwich Street (614), 77 Water Street (600), 30 Broad Street (521), 100 William Street (430), 75 Maiden Lane (300), 100 Wall Street (169), Two Wall Street (169), 40 Fulton Street (169), 64 Fulton Street (49), One Maiden Lane (12), 14 Maiden Lane (nine), and Five Hanover Square (unknown number of units).
Together, these 18 projects are poised to bring at least 7,557 new homes to the square mile south of Chambers Street, boosting the local overall tally of homes by approximately one fifth in the coming years. Based on 2020 census data, which indicate that the typical size of a Lower Manhattan household is now 2.02 persons, this implies population growth of slightly more than 15,000 new residents.
Many of these office conversions are likely to take place under the terms of the City’s 467-m program (also known as Affordable Housing from Commercial Conversions program), which mandates that 25 percent of the apartments created must be set aside as affordable units, in exchange for tax abatements on the entire property for 25 to 35 years. This program could create almost 1,900 rent-protected homes in Lower Manhattan.
But some critics argue that the scheme is overly generous to developers and doesn’t deliver enough benefits to the public. In a 2025 analysis, then-City Comptroller Brad Lander noted, “post-pandemic conversion activity already appears on track to exceed the totals subsidized… in the Financial District in the 1990’s and 2000’s,” but that the 467-m program is, “likely too generous in Lower Manhattan.”
Mr. Lander’s report added that the “opportunity cost” (meaning property taxes that will never be collected as a result of 467-m), “is $3.8 billion in Lower Manhattan. The opportunity cost outside of Lower Manhattan is $1.4 billion.” Out of a projected total of $5.1 billion in waived revenue, some 75 percent of these benefits will go to developers in Lower Manhattan.
The same report found that Lower Manhattan is not only the site of more office-to-residential conversions than any other district in the five boroughs, but more than all the others combined. Mr. Lander noted that since 2020, New York City as a whole has seen the conversion of 13.5 million square feet of obsolete office space into 16,510 units of housing, of which 9,297 units (or 7.8 million square feet) have been in the area south of Canal Street (primarily the Financial District). This translates into approximately 56 percent of all such conversions in New York taking place in the square mile at the southern tip of Manhattan.