Plumber in SoHo

Converted early, and often informally

SoHo's lofts were among the first in the city to become housing, largely from the late 1960s onward and initially by artists occupying manufacturing space. A great deal of the original plumbing work in these buildings was done at that time, on a small budget, by whoever was available.

That history is still in the walls. Alongside it sits work from every decade since, as units changed hands and were renovated properly. The mixture is what makes SoHo distinctive to work in: within one building you may find a bathroom put in in 1974 and one put in in 2019, on the same stack.

What we find

• Improvised early conversions. Undersized waste, missing or improvised venting, supply run by the shortest route rather than a serviceable one
• Deep narrow floor plates. These buildings are long front to back with windows only at the ends, and fixtures often sit in the dark middle, far from everything
• Original cast iron stacks and house drains under a century and a half of use
• Retail below, residences above, on a shared drain, with the ground floor turning over regularly
• Joint live-work units, where the space serves both purposes and the plumbing reflects neither cleanly

The cast-iron facades

SoHo's historic district is one of the most closely regulated in the city, and the cast-iron fronts are the reason. Nothing that alters or penetrates a facade is straightforward. Vent terminations, condensate lines and any external pipework need to be considered at the design stage, because the answer on a protected front is frequently that it has to go somewhere else.

Ground-floor retail

The retail here is dense and it changes hands often. Each fit-out adds pipework and abandons some. For an incoming tenant the useful step is a survey establishing what is actually there and what condition it is in, before the lease terms are agreed rather than after the build has started. See commercial plumbing.

Where we cover

Houston down to Canal, Sixth Avenue to Lafayette: Greene, Mercer, Wooster, West Broadway, Spring, Prince, Broome and Grand, and the Hudson Square blocks to the west.