Plumber in Flatiron

Built big, and built for something else

The Flatiron District went up between roughly 1890 and 1915 as a wholesale and showroom quarter. The buildings are masonry and steel, ten to twenty stories, with very large open floors and generous ceiling heights. What they were not built with is much plumbing: a stack, a few utility sinks, and restrooms in the core.

Everything else has been added since, and that is where the character of the work here comes from.

The consequences of a big floor plate

• Very long horizontal runs. A kitchen or a bathroom at the perimeter may be eighty feet from the stack. Fall is limited, so the pitch is shallow and blockages accumulate along the run rather than at the trap.
• Leaks that surface a long way from the fault. Water runs along the underside of the deck until it finds a penetration. See leak detection.
• Mixed use on one stack. An office floor, a residential floor and a studio floor may share a waste line, with completely different usage patterns.
• Venting that was extended rather than designed. The most common cause of a fixture that gurgles and smells with nothing visibly wrong.

Conversions of different vintages

Floors here were converted at very different times, and the era shows in the plumbing. Work from the 1970s and 1980s tends to be minimal and improvised. Work from the 2000s onward is generally properly engineered. In a single building you can find both, which means the answer to what is behind this wall genuinely varies floor by floor.

Working around a business

A great many of these floors are commercial, and a shutdown has a cost measured in trading hours. Scheduling around that, and isolating the smallest possible section rather than the easiest one, is most of what makes a job here go well.

Where we cover

Broadway and Fifth between 17th and 26th, the side streets east to Park Avenue South, Madison Square, the blocks around Union Square North, and the Ladies Mile stretch along Sixth.