There are about a thousand real-estate developers in New York City. Nathan Berman is one of them, and he’s become rich doing it. But, he told me recently, “I never built a building from scratch, and never wanted to.” Instead, Berman, who is sixty-four, specializes in taking existing structures and converting them into apartments, a useful trick in a city that’s always starved for housing—and newly wary of the five-day-a week office routine. In 2017, he converted 443 Greenwich Street, a former warehouse and book bindery in Tribeca, built in 1883, into a luxury condo; among the celebrities who now own apartments there are Harry Styles and Jake Gyllenhaal. (The building was designed to be “paparazzi-proof,” so it features an underground parking area with a valet.) It’s not much of a feat, though, to redo an industrial space that has a rudimentary interior. Berman is more excited by the transformation of huge, obsolete office towers into warrens of one- and two-bedroom apartments. He compares the effort to extract as much residential rental space as possible out of such buildings to solving a Rubik’s Cube.
This story is from the May 06, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the May 06, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Thataway Thomas McGuane
The two sisters were growing old now, but they went on gazing toward Palm Springs from this windblown prairie town as though to Mecca.
THE CURRENT CINEMA APOCALYPSE WHEN
“Megalopolis.”
THE THEATRE - PHOTO REALISM
Moisés Kaufman's Here There Are Blueberries.”
AGE OF ANXIETY
The love songs of Billie Eilish.
FAMILY PORTRAIT
In his latest novel, Garth Risk Hallberg shrinks his frame.
EYES UP HERE
The perils and pleasures of a nice rack.
A CRITIC AT LARGE SAY THE WORD
Why liberals struggle to defend liberalism.
A REPORTER AT LARGE YOU MAKE ME SICK
How corporate scientists discovered—and then helped to conceal—the dangers of forever chemicals.
THE WORLD OF TELEVISION CASTOFFS
REALITY-TV CONTESTANTS ARE BARELY PAID, AND THE EXPERIENCE CAN FEEL LIKE ABUSE. SHOULD THEY UNIONIZE?
SHOUTS & MURMURS IDENTIFIED
A panel of scientific experts commissioned by NASA to study unidentified anomalous phenomena,” more widely known as UFOs, said Thursday that it found no evidence that any of the reported objects were extraterrestrial in origin.