161 Maiden Lane has quite a tumultuous past. What was supposed to be luxury high-rise living in the Financial District of NYC, with a sweet view of the East River, turned into a financial fiasco and a construction blame game that put a halt to the potentially unfixable leaning tower that has been described as "banana-shaped."
In 2015 Fortis Property Group broke ground on One Seaport, which was supposed to be a US$272 million, 60-floor, glass-encased, luxury river-view project. Fortis expected to sell the 80 units for anywhere from $1.2 million to over $18 million for its penthouse listings.
When construction commenced, Fortis opted to take the easier, cheaper route of making a foundation for the 670-ft-tall (204-m) building to sit on, as it would save the company around 2.21% of the overall construction costs. And that's where this legend begins.
Skyscrapers in New York City's financial district generally use pile foundations. Construction starts by drilling steel pylons into the bedrock below ground – typically around 50 ft (15 m) deep in that area – before starting the above-ground floors. It has been this way since the late 1800s. Unfortunately for Fortis, its $64 million site was located on what is known as Colonial "infill." In the 1600s, the Dutch laid out Maiden Lane with whatever infill they could get their hands on: rocks, sand, trash – anything they could find to expand the footprint of the island for more real estate.
Fortis had hired geotechnical surveyors who found a 24-foot (7-m) layer of infill composed of everything from gravel and bricks to old docks and shipwrecks. Below that, a layer of former marshland, then sandy glacial deposits from thousands of years ago, some decomposed rocks ... and finally, about 155 ft (47 m) below the surface was bedrock, the stuff skyscrapers are ideally built on.
Instead of digging down 14 stories to install a pile foundation for this incredibly tall and skinny structure – 15:1, if you can believe it – Fortis elected to inject concrete into the soil to firm it up. "Soil improvement," the company called it, and it would shave $6 million off the top; a savings of 2.21%. An engineering consultant submitted a nearly 100-page report listing all the reasons why that would be a bad idea, citing reasons like "differential settlements," i.e., "it might lean." The report went unheeded, and construction commenced.
It wouldn't take long for the problems to begin.
New York's Department of Buildings had initiated over a dozen stop-work orders against the construction of One Seaport for various safety violations before September of 2017, when a construction worker fell to his death from the 29th floor as he was moving a plank to clear room for a crane operator. SSC High Rise, the local construction company building the tower's concrete superstructure, pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter before shuttering its doors for business in March of 2018.
A new concrete contractor replaced SSC a month later, and during its review of the existing structure sent a memo: "There are structural issues, unusual settlement ... The building is leaning three inches to the north." Rather than attempting to fix the root of the problem – you know, the important stuff like the foundation – the new company tried to counterweight the building by pouring the south side out of alignment.
"What happened was, as the building went up, the parties tried to pull it back and it kind of counterweighted," a lawyer representing Pizzarotti, the construction management company for Fortis, would later tell a judge. "Your Honor, it's shaped like a banana right now."
When the building was measured in 2019, some floors were as far as 10 inches (254 mm) out of alignment, and the building was still moving.
By July of 2020, all construction ceased on 161 Maiden Lane and the dream of One Seaport may have ceased with it. Most of the units – 71 of the 80 – had already been sold and deposits had been made. With no completion date or even a resuming-of-construction date (if ever), all of the buyers have since backed out. Not all of them have received all of their money back yet. As it stands, the project was supposed to have been finished over four years ago.
There are so many lawsuits surrounding the incomplete leaning tower that I can't even find an exact number. Developers, contractors, lenders, subcontractors, and even law firms are all suing and counter-suing one another for everything from unpaid fees to loan defaults to fraud.
Over the last several years, structural engineers have assured the public that the unfinished building is unlikely to fall over. In fact, Ronald Hamburger, the structural engineer responsible for stabilizing the sinking of the Millennium Tower in San Francisco, reported that not-quite-plumb buildings aren't all that uncommon as large buildings settle.
A little unnerving? Yeah, maybe. But with over $300 million already sunk into this project, it's difficult to imagine that it won't eventually be picked up by someone to finish what was started nearly a decade ago. Even if it's a little crooked.
Sources: The New Yorker, The Impossible Build
