Plumber in Union Square
Few places in Manhattan mix uses as tightly as the blocks around the square, and the drainage carries all of it.
Everything on top of everything
Around Union Square you get large-format retail at street level, offices on the middle floors, apartments above, and restaurants filling the gaps, frequently in the same building. Each use puts a different load on the same stacks and the same house drain.
That arrangement is the source of most of the work here. A fault that appears residential turns out to be commercial in origin, and the reverse happens just as often.
The building stock
| Pre-war apartment houses | On the side streets east and north. Galvanized risers of an age, roof tank supply, everything ageing together |
|---|---|
| Loft and commercial buildings | Around the square itself and down Broadway, converted in various decades to offices and residences |
| Older row houses | Subdivided long ago, particularly toward Gramercy and the East Village edge |
| Post-war and recent | Filling gaps, with modern systems and high-rise pressure zoning |
Retail at scale
Large stores mean public restrooms with very high use, and those are a maintenance commitment rather than a set of fixtures. Flush valves, stop valves and faucet cartridges here wear out on a schedule, and planning for that is cheaper than responding to it. The same applies to food service, which is dense on the surrounding blocks.
Coordination is most of the job
In a mixed building a shutdown affects a store's trading, an office's working day and residents' evenings, all at once, and each has a different window in which it can tolerate it. The work of getting a job done here is largely the work of agreeing when. We would rather settle that at the quote than discover it on site.
Where we cover
14th to 23rd between Fifth and Third Avenues: the square itself, Broadway and Park Avenue South, Irving Place, the Gramercy edge and the blocks toward Stuyvesant Square.
Plumber needed in Union Square?
Call and tell us the cross street and which floor you are on.