The Leaning Tower of New York

At the end of the fifth season of “Million Dollar Listing New York,” which aired in 2016, Fredrik Eklund, a Swedish adult-film actor turned real-estate broker, was in the grips of a professional crisis. He was desperate to become the listing agent for a new condominium project called 1 Seaport, and had spent weeks fanatically courting its developers at the Fortis Property Group. “I can’t sleep without this building,” Eklund said. “I’m obsessed.” 1 Seaport was to be the first all-glass residential skyscraper ever built on the lower-Manhattan waterfront—sixty stories of upscale urban living, at the edge of the financial district.

A Fortis executive made Eklund a deal. If he could sell twenty of the eighty planned units before construction began—if he could sell them in just eight weeks—Eklund would get the exclusive on the building. Net sales were projected to reach some three hundred million dollars, and the broker’s cut would be hefty. “My whole life has been leading up to this very moment,” Eklund told the executive. “I’m getting loosey-goosey just talking to you about it.”

Since the financial crisis, luxury residential skyscrapers have gone up in New York higher and faster than ever before. In Manhattan, many of these structures are clustered in a corridor of midtown called Billionaires’ Row, where hedge-fund managers, foreign plutocrats, and celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Sting have reportedly bought units. Though 1 Seaport’s common amenities would include a private porte cochère, a hydrotherapy spa, and, on the thirtieth floor, the practically de-rigueur infinity pool, it was aimed at buyers perhaps a few rungs down the ladder. “Thirty million dollars or more—those are the people we want to get,” Eklund told his sales team, back at the office. He considered travelling to South Africa, Monaco, Hong Kong, and Singapore to woo buyers, and ultimately settled on London. Armed with little more than a few artist’s renderings, he quickly sold the twenty units.

1 Seaport appealed to American buyers, too, including the Miu family, of Holmdel, New Jersey. Louis Miu, who had come to New York in 1970 and put himself through college working at a Chinese restaurant in Bensonhurst, had founded an accounting firm, and was prominent in the city’s Chinese American business community. He, his wife, Carolyn, and their daughter, Erin, who was in her twenties, were drawn to Unit 15-A, a one-bedroom with ten-foot ceilings, three little closets, a terrace overlooking the East River, and an asking price of nearly two million dollars. The Mius signed a purchase agreement with Fortis in March, 2017, and put down a deposit of nearly four hundred thousand dollars. The company said that units in the tower would be ready to close as early as New Year’s Day. “No closings occurred that year,” a lawyer for the Mius would later write.

Still, the family was willing to wait. In the fall of 2018, Erin got married, and a few months later the Mius altered their contract to acquire two units, which would be combined into one larger apartment. Though the building was more than a year behind schedule, they doubled their deposit.

It wasn’t until the following summer that the developers admitted that there was a small problem. On June 26, 2019, the Fortis Property Group issued an amendment to the building’s offering plan, the contract between the developer and the buyers. The building’s contractors had recently completed the tower’s superstructure. The imposing gray mass was at that point among the hundred tallest structures on the city’s skyline, six feet taller than Trump Tower. “The slab edges on the north side of the building are misaligned by up to 8 inches,” the developer disclosed. 1 Seaport was six hundred and seventy feet tall, and leaning.

For as long as humans have made towers, some have leaned. The Tower of Pisa started settling unevenly on its shallow foundation not long after its third floor was added, in 1178. Despite the increasingly obvious problem, five more floors were built over the next two centuries; the ornate bell chamber was finished in 1372. In 1990, when the angle passed five degrees, and the top of the tower was fifteen feet out of plumb, the structure was said to be finally in danger of collapsing. Crews siphoned earth from underneath the building to mitigate the problem, though by then it was unthinkable to eliminate the lean entirely. Millions of tourists came to see the flawed structure every year. A complete fix would have devastated the local economy.

The allure of a tilted building knows no cultural boundary. In the fourteenth century, when the medieval traveller Ibn Battuta visited the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, in Mosul, he wrote that its curving minaret was “splendid,” and affectionately referred to it as al-Habda, or “the hunchback.” The mosque was destroyed in 2017, during the Battle of Mosul. unesco later surveyed locals about restoring it, and ninety-four per cent of respondents said that they wanted the minaret rebuilt “exactly as it was.” The Leaning Temple of Huma, in India, has drawn pilgrims for centuries. The complex’s tall central tower tilts visibly one way. Arrayed around it are several smaller towers that tilt visibly the other way. No one knows why this is.

The Fortis Property Group, destined to put up one of the tallest leaning towers in the history of mankind, was founded in 2005 by Louis and Joel Kestenbaum and some partners. The Kestenbaums, a father and son who are members of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, made their reputations in city real-estate circles during the redevelopment of the Brooklyn waterfront, which went from a sagging industrial district to an international life-style capital. They were known as risktakers, willing to outbid bigger companies on projects that they believed in. In 2013, Fortis paid sixty-four million dollars for one of the last undeveloped parcels in lower Manhattan, a small parking lot at the end of Maiden Lane. This was where 1 Seaport would stand.

An ideal site for a skyscraper is above strong, flat bedrock that is relatively close to the surface, about fifty feet underground. The bedrock below much of midtown is at that depth. 161 Maiden Lane is not such a site. The Dutch, who laid out Maiden Lane in the seventeenth century, were the first to use “infill”—sand, stones, trash, whatever was handy—to expand the contours of Manhattan. Later, local officials sold “water lots,” or parcels of land submerged below the East River or the Hudson River, on which developers could dump infill themselves. When geotechnical consultants hired by Fortis took soundings of the earth underneath the parking lot, they found a mishmash. First, twenty-four feet of Colonial-era infill, composed of gravel, silt, concrete, steel, bricks, and chunks of old shipwrecks and docks. Below that, pancaked former marshland. Below that, sandy deposits left by glaciers thousands of years ago, and a layer of decomposed rock. The bedrock under 161 Maiden Lane was way down there, about a hundred and fifty-five feet below ground level.

It’s not impossible to build a skyscraper on a lot like this, but it usually involves more work. “Begin by descending,” St. Augustine wrote, more than a millennium ago. “You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.” Structural engineers in New York City are still giving this kind of advice to their clients. “I always tell them, pay the foundation person more money than you’d ever imagine paying them, because you will never fix a foundation,” Nat Oppenheimer, a senior vice-president at the engineering firm TYLin, told me.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, skyscrapers in the financial district have been built using “pile” foundations, formed by drilling steel pylons through the ground until they reach bedrock. The Fortis Property Group, for reasons that remain the subject of multiple overlapping and complex civil litigations, opted for a different kind of foundation, less often used in Manhattan high-rise construction, called “soil improvement,” which involves injecting concrete into the ground to firm it up. The process promised to save the company six million dollars, but it came with some risks. An engineering consultant named Robert Alperstein produced a nearly hundred-page report that warned Fortis that the method could lead to “differential settlements.” In other words, the structure might lean. All other nearby buildings, the report said, were anchored to the earth by piles.

Construction was under way when, in the fall of 2016, the Kestenbaums invited real-estate big shots, brokers, and reporters to a party to toast 1 Seaport. A Hinckley yacht ferried the guests to dinner at the River Café, in Brooklyn, where they were served individual mousse cakes topped with chocolate in the shape of the Brooklyn Bridge. Soon, potential buyers were being taken on “hard hat” tours of the building as it crept up into the sky. One prospective buyer, who asked not to be named, recalled riding a rickety lift to one of the middle floors of the tower, to look at a slab of fresh concrete where blueprints called for a two-bedroom unit. “There was construction debris, and safety fencing at the edges,” the buyer said. The wind was whipping in off the East River. “Still,” she added, “I could tell it wouldn’t work from a closet-space perspective.”

To build 1 Seaport, Fortis hired Pizzarotti, a renowned Italian construction firm that was trying to break into the New York City high-rise market, as the construction manager. Pizzarotti in turn hired a local company called SSC High Rise to build the tower’s concrete superstructure. The job site was troubled from the start. “Workers were operating equipment in darkness, without light, and there was debris in the work area,” an attorney on one of the many lawsuits involving the project told me. The Department of Buildings slapped more than a dozen stop-work orders on the property, several for safety violations. It was the kind of nonunion job site that inspired Local 157, the Manhattan carpenters’ union, to bring out one of its large inflatable rats. James Makin, a former organizer with the union, who spent many days leafletting outside 1 Seaport, told me recently that SSC High Rise was notorious. “Another contractor cutting corners to get things done,” he said.

Among the workers on the project was a forty-four-year-old carpenter from Ecuador named Juan Chonillo. He had moved to Queens in 2006 with his older sister, Angela, and joined some cousins working in high-rise construction. Angela marvelled at how quickly her brother had picked up English on the job sites. He was sending money home to his five kids. He was happy in New York.

On the morning of September 21, 2017, Chonillo and several of his cousins were standing on a movable construction platform attached to 1 Seaport’s recently poured twenty-ninth floor. Around 9:15 a.m., a foreman working for SSC High Rise ordered that a crane operator move the platform. It got snagged, and Chonillo made for the edge, to try to wrench it free. The platform wobbled. Chonillo fell through the air for about five seconds, and landed on the sidewalk scaffolding running along Maiden Lane. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The crane operator “came outside from the building and he was crying,” an employee at the job site later said in a sworn statement. “He told me that he asked at least five times if all the workers were off the platform and he was told that there were no workers on the platform.”

Construction in Manhattan is a small world. Makin, the union organizer, received numerous texts and images from Chonillo’s colleagues almost immediately after he hit the scaffolding. Makin rushed downtown. The site was ringed with yellow police tape. Angela Chonillo was there, wailing. The lawyers Gail and Robert Kelner, who later represented Angela in a wrongful-death suit filed against 1 Seaport’s builders, said that Chonillo’s fall was one of the most egregious construction-site cases they’d seen in decades of workplace-injury lawsuits. “There never should have been workers on the platform,” Gail Kelner said. “It was extremely shoddy, sloppy, frightening workmanship.”