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The Leaning Tower of New York

How a luxury condo building in Manhattan went sideways.

"Your Honor" an attorney involved in a 1 Seaport lawsuit explained to a judge, “it’s shaped like a banana right now.”Illustration by Vincent Mahé

"Your Honor" an attorney involved in a 1 Seaport lawsuit explained to a judge, “it’s shaped like a banana right now.”Illustration by Vincent Mahé

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.”

Eventually, SSC High Rise pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter. The fine was ten thousand dollars, which even the Manhattan District Attorney, Cyrus Vance, acknowledged was “pennies on the dollar compared to the potential profits on a high-rise construction job in a booming real-estate market.” But his investigators had been stymied. SSC High Rise employees, including Chonillo’s cousins, had refused to talk to them. “No one wanted to jeopardize their jobs by speaking up,” an investigator for the D.A.’s office who worked on the case told me. The D.A. never even got the name of the foreman who gave the order to move the platform.

Angela Chonillo put three thousand dollars on her credit card to pay for her brother’s funeral. She said that she never again spoke to the cousins who were with Juan the day he fell. Two of them, including the one who had got Chonillo the job at 1 Seaport, later died from covid-19. “He didn’t want to testify, out of fear, maybe,” she told me recently, sitting in the Kelners’ office, in the financial district, just a few blocks from where Juan died.

After Chonillo’s death, the city paused construction on 1 Seaport for about three months. When work resumed, SSC High Rise disappeared. One morning in March, 2018, the company’s employees simply didn’t show up for work. They were never seen on the job site again, and the firm later went out of business. (“I don’t recall,” Timothy Mahoney, the C.E.O. of SSC High Rise, would later say in a deposition, when asked to supply a date for his company’s closure.)

The project fell further behind, and soon the relationship between Pizzarotti and Fortis soured, too. “Maiden lane . . . the gift that keeps giving,” one of the project’s lenders wrote to a colleague. The Italian contractors seem to have been perplexed by the cutthroat nature of New York City construction. The New Yorkers, meanwhile, were at times baffled by the Italians’ genteel airs. “Often I personally ask myself what I should do more to be more effective in my action and I do not always find the answer,” Stefano Soncini, a Pizzarotti executive, wrote to a Fortis executive in a rambling e-mail. “I hope you can find in my words the serenity necessary to make you soon return to work with us with the enthusiasm necessary to win this challenge.” By the end of the note, Soncini was embarrassed at his verbosity. “I wrote a poem and I apologize for the time that I made you lose,” he signed off. There was a lot of that going around 1 Seaport.

In an attempt to resolve the growing tensions between their two firms, Louis Kestenbaum and Paolo Pizzarotti traded e-mails, corporate patriarch to corporate patriarch. “Dear Paolo,” Kestenbaum wrote. “As we mentioned to you previously, completion by the end of the year is too late. It would be devastating to us. It would result in many purchaser contract cancellations, leading to a complete financial disaster.”

Pizzarotti, the grandson of his firm’s founder and a cavaliere del lavoro, or knight of Italy’s Order of Merit for Labor, was magnanimous. “Dear Luis,” he wrote, misspelling his client’s name. “I hope you’re well.” He suggested several ways that the project might move faster—including having the job site open seven days a week. Kestenbaum was apoplectic. “I have neverworked with anyone on a Saturday and will never work on a Saturday,” he wrote. “It is a matter of religious principles which are not negotiable.”

After SSC High Rise ghosted the project, Pizzarotti brought in a replacement concrete contractor to finish the superstructure. The new firm did a review of the tower and noticed something amiss. On April 17, 2018, Pizzarotti received a fateful memo: “There are structural issues, unusual settlement. . . . The building is leaning 3 inches to the north.”

But, as with Pisa, work on the tower did not stop. It only got more frenzied. “There is a lot of organizational disorder and many uncertainties in decision-making,” Soncini, the Pizzarotti poet, wrote to his muse at the Fortis Property Group. “The situation of One Seaport project is of great frustration for everyone, including myself.” Rather than pausing to fix what had already been done, an attempt was made to straighten the thing out in midair. To compensate for the lean, higher floors were intentionally poured out of alignment, in the opposite direction. This compounded the problem. “What happened was, as the building went up, the parties tried to pull it back and it kind of counterweighted,” a lawyer representing Pizzarotti later explained to a judge. “Your Honor,” the lawyer said, “it’s shaped like a banana right now.”

Measurements taken in the winter of 2019 indicated that the building was as much as ten inches out of alignment on some floors. Pizzarotti had had enough. On March 22nd, the company filed a lawsuit, seeking to break its contract. In a complaint, Pizzarotti’s lawyers claimed that Fortis had withheld crucial information about 1 Seaport’s foundation. They also said that the building was “still moving,” and that they didn’t know how much further it might lean if it was simply left standing. Many participants and observers in the 1 Seaport saga suggested to me that a local contractor may have had more incentive to deal with the tower’s problems. Pizzarotti, a foreign firm, had leeway to bail. “They had to get the fuck out,” someone involved in 1 Seaport’s development told me.

Fortis countersued, and the company blamed Pizzarotti for the issues that arose during the tower’s construction, including Chonillo’s death, which happened the second day of Rosh Hashanah. “The accident took place on a Jewish holiday, a day during which Pizzarotti was contractually prohibited from working,” a Fortis executive said in an affidavit. “This terrible incident . . . could have been avoided had Pizzarotti followed the rules.” The ensuing web of 1 Seaport lawsuits—there are now more than two dozen—continue to wind through Manhattan’s civil courts. Even the lawyers can’t seem to believe how many lawyers are involved. One exasperated judge castigated all parties for waging “an endless war of attrition.”

Work on 1 Seaport stopped in July, 2020, and it has not resumed. In 2021, the building was put into the custody of Richard Cohn, a kind of real-estate foster parent who tends to neglected and litigation-scarred properties throughout the city. The tower has continued to sulk over the waterfront, more a ruin than a construction site, its grim façade visible from the Brooklyn Bridge, the Wall Street heliport, and even from the N.Y.P.D.’s headquarters, nearly a mile away. The barren structure, half wrapped in glass, is particularly noticeable at night, when strings of bright construction lights illuminate every floor. Despite Cohn’s efforts to secure the building, it was vandalized in late 2023. Three graffiti artists used ropes to scale up the side of 1 Seaport, and tagged the northern face with a stack of giant bubble letters—“XSM RAMS NOTE”—spanning the top three stories. “There was no guard,” one of the artists told me. “We could have gone through the front door.”

The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, in his 1978 manifesto, “Delirious New York,” wrote that a skyscraper “cannot avoid being a symbol—an empty one, available for meaning as a billboard is for advertisement.” People look at a thwarted building and see what they want to see. In the fifteen-fifties, when Pieter Bruegel the Elder set out to depict the Tower of Babel, he painted a structure that was visibly crooked, though no lean is mentioned in Scripture. In recent years, several of the slender towers on Billionaires’ Row have been afflicted with excessive swaying and creaking, problems that are gleefully treated in the press as morality plays about rising inequality. (“High Anxiety: Super-rich Find Supertall Skyscraper an Uncomfortable Perch,” read one headline in the Guardian.) A decade ago, the Millennium Tower, a new residential skyscraper in San Francisco, was found to be several inches out of plumb and tilting further every month. Managers at Fortis and Pizzarotti, unaware of what was in store for them, exchanged gaga e-mails about the situation. “What a mess that is, I wouldn’t feel safe in that building at all!” one Pizzarotti employee wrote.

Structural engineers have determined repeatedly over the years that the structure at 161 Maiden Lane is unlikely to topple over. But the project known as 1 Seaport collapsed long ago. No broker in the world can sell a leaning tower at twenty-four hundred dollars per square foot, even if the lean is imperceptible to the naked eye, and even though the flaw is not so anomalous. Ronald Hamburger, the structural engineer who devised the nine-figure repair job for the Millennium Tower, told me that he and his colleagues canvassed the Bay Area and discovered that tilted buildings were quite common. “But because they weren’t high-end residential condominiums, no one cared,” he said.

Representatives for the Fortis Property Group, Pizzarotti, SSC High Rise, and more than a dozen other firms and individuals involved in 1 Seaport declined to comment for this story. Several of the Fortis Property Group’s lawyers have quit working for the company, and one firm has sued for unpaid bills. Buyers, including the Mius, have sued to recover their deposits. (The Mius, too, declined to comment.) At least a quarter of a billion dollars has been collectively spent on 1 Seaport, and yet everyone claims to be out of pocket.

The Fortis Property Group still hopes to finish 1 Seaport, someday. Perhaps there would be people willing to live in it. Prices are still high on Billionaires’ Row, despite the swaying. (Engineers have found ingenious ways to install bespoke dampers, some involving giant sloshing tanks of water, to minimize residents’ feelings of nausea.) And stalled towers are rarely abandoned for good. Construction on the Jeddah Tower, in Saudi Arabia, which is slated to be the world’s first kilometre-high skyscraper, has resumed after a six-year pause that followed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s arrest of the project’s primary backer, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. The Ryugyong Hotel, a thousand-foot concrete pyramid intended to awe the world, loomed partially built over Pyongyang, North Korea, for more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, an enormous L.E.D. screen has been fitted on one side, and at night it displays propaganda.

Hoping to get a closer look at 1 Seaport, I sent e-mails to some of the companies with offices in 180 Maiden Lane, a forty-one-story skyscraper right across the street. An executive with a direct view of the busted tower invited me to take a peek. “I was excited when I got this office, because I like having construction outside my window—something to look at while I daydream,” he told me. “But then I started to notice that nothing was happening.”

When the sun sets, the tower takes on a menacing quality, with its concrete terraces jutting out like spikes on a club. Later at night, when the construction lights are on, it’s possible to imagine that the building is inhabited—that people are up there drinking wine, slipping into the infinity pool, looking down on the city at their feet. Before it started leaning, 1 Seaport was designed to withstand hundreds of years of wind off the harbor. Until someone figures out what to do with it, it’ll hang there, the tallest eyesore on the skyline. 

Author: Eric Lach

Source: The New Yorker

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