DESIGN FOR LIVING

Can converting office towers into apartments save empty downtowns from ruin?

- D. T MAX

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.