A gloved hand grips a steel guardrail at the edge of a raw concrete floor, and below it there is nothing for 22 stories.
That void was not a mistake.
It was the only answer the architects could find to a problem that had already killed a hundred simpler proposals.
The floor plates here ran to about 40,000 square feet each, far too deep for any window on the outside wall to help the middle.
So the team cut straight down through the building twice, and what came out of that decision is now the largest office to residential conversion by unit count in United States history.
Why deep floors kill a conversion before it begins
An office tower built for check processing and mainframe banking did not need daylight in the middle of the plan. Security and efficiency ruled the layout, with minimal windows and vast floor plates stretching past 40,000 square feet. That produces deep interior zones that no window on any exterior wall can reach.
The standard answer to that problem is demolition. But demolition wastes the steel, the concrete and the foundations already in the ground. The cheaper, stranger answer was surgical: cut two light wells straight through the building’s bulk and let the sky back in.
Those two central courtyards were carved into the original floor plates, and the area removed was added back at the top of the tower to maintain overall square footage. Apartments on the new upper floors got views the original tenants never had. That exchange, void for height, is the engineering key to the whole project.
What the building was and why the offices emptied
The tower is a 22 story, 1.1 million square foot structure in Lower Manhattan, originally fitted with narrow, irregular openings rather than the glazing a home needs. It was formerly home to Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and later to JPMorgan Chase, the Daily News and the National Enquirer. By most standard criteria for office to residential conversion, it was a poor candidate.
Office demand in the district thinned after the pandemic, and the building went to a team that wanted it for something else. Metro Loft, Rockwood Capital and GFP Real Estate bought the nearly vacant tower in 2022 for $251 million and secured a $536 million loan for the conversion. “Office was no longer the best and highest use,” Brian Steinwurtzel of GFP told Multi-Housing News.
The result is called SoMA. At 1,320 units it is the largest office to residential project in the United States to date, with 100,000 square feet of amenities and capacity for about 2,000 residents.
How you add ten stories to a building that was not built for them
Construction topped out at 32 stories, ten above the original parapet. The work required a new lateral load resisting system, reinforcement of existing beams and columns, two new egress stairs and four new passenger elevators, while old elevator and stair shafts were filled in. Each of those changes cascades through the floor plans: a new stair eats square footage, a filled shaft changes load paths, a reinforced column interrupts what had been an open office run.
The facade changed too, though not the way early renderings promised. Brick was retained and cut surgically for new openings, turning the middle of the tower into banded horizontal windows that follow the stepping of the original slabs. Then the red brick was painted white to bounce more light into the street.
The tower was completed in 1969, and each of the 21 existing floors now holds 52 residential units. Structural engineers reinforced the old frame both vertically and laterally to carry the addition above.
The programme that made the permits move
25 Water Street moved through the city’s Office Conversion Accelerator, an interagency effort that expedites zoning assessments and permits for conversions. Without that, a project crossing structural, zoning and mechanical review can sit in queue for years before a wall comes down. The programme is a direct response to the scale of the problem the city faces.
Money mattered as much as paperwork. The project was also the first office to residential conversion to use New York’s 467-m housing tax exemption, a programme that requires a quarter of the apartments to be reserved for households earning on average 80 percent of area median income and rent stabilized in perpetuity.
The national numbers explain why the city wanted this to move. The 2026 edition of RentCafe’s conversion report counts 90,300 units planned nationwide, up 28 percent in a single year and nearly four times the 2022 figure, with New York leading at 16,358 apartments under development. The demand is not theoretical.
What the building became and what it still cannot answer
The all electric building opened to residents during 2025 while construction was still wrapping up on shared spaces and the streetscape. Units range from studios to three bedrooms at roughly 50 per floor, with penthouses in the new crown, and most include a home office and views to the water and the skyline.
The subtraction is not free. Every level the voids cross gives up floor area, paid back only by the ten stories added overhead and the reinforcement needed to carry them. So the arithmetic works, but only just.
What the project cannot answer is whether the same move works at every deep floored office tower. Each building has its own column grid, its own slab thickness, its own foundation margin. The courtyard cut that worked here may not clear the column lines at the next address. Even so, the architect has already toured conversion candidates in California and Texas with interested owners, buildings that might yet be threaded with light rather than demolished, and the structural engineers behind this one expect more such projects in New York within the decade.
