A Marvel of Engineering at Bryant Park

It’s now called The Columns, but old-school New Yorkers still know it as the Engineers Club. Built in 1907 on the south side of Bryant Park, the 82-unit co-op had originally been one of three clubs on the block. (The other two, the New York Club and the Republican Club, are both long gone.) The Engineers Club was renovated and converted to a co-op in the 1980s.

“It's a really beautiful building inside,” says Joan Konow, a principal at Key Real Estate, the manager of the property. “They have a grand staircase that goes to the second and third floors. It's very nice.”

Now that grand old building is about to undergo another change. For a number of years, the elevator has been deteriorating. “It was not leveling; it was jumping,” Konow says. “We had a couple of elevator engineers look at it and they said it has passed its useful life expectancy.”

The seven-member board discussed the job with Konow, and everyone agreed that the refurbishment of the elevators was also a good time to implement another project. “One of the neighborhood restaurants uses the basement for storage for liquor, and the board wants to expand on that as a way to increase their income,” says Konow. “They want to develop the basement space. It’s huge...and they want to use that for storage as well. So they need to get [easy] access.”

That led to the Big Idea: dropping the elevator through solid bedrock into the basement. Not an easy task and not often done. “The board is rightfully concerned as a portion of the bedrock must be removed in a fully occupied building, but that's in the hands of the engineer,” says Konow. “There is no other option to proceed with the work, so I have no choice but to place confidence in the professionals and leave it up to them. They tell me it's going to be fine. The engineer has assured me that though he has broken through bedrock in a building before, he has not done so to facilitate the installation of an elevator through it.”

The job was scheduled to take two years, from the initial planning to completion. “There are so many people to coordinate: the mechanical engineer, a structural engineer, the elevator consultant engineer, and then we had the building engineer,” Konow says. “Onsite, there's the super there and myself, and then the board president is extremely active. He's there a lot, too, because he’s self-employed.”

The estimated price tag is about $1 million. “The board has been doing assessments for a number of years because they decided a while ago that that would be the best way to fund the projects,” Konow says. “They've done three assessments for it as expenses rose. As each phase of the project gets closer to final completion, the board and management get closer to knowing exactly what it's ultimately going to cost. Unfortunately, this is the nature of undertaking work that has variables."

Konow believes it’s important to keep shareholders in the loop. The building has a mixture of young professionals and a number of people who have been there since the building was converted. “It's a good collection of people,” she says. “They're informed, and the additional income is exciting for them.”

PROJECT PLAYERS: PROPERTY MANAGER: Joan Konow of Key Real Estate. SUPERVISING ENGINEER: James Wagman of James Wagman Architect. MECHANICAL ENGINEER: New York Engineers. STRUCTURAL ENGINEER: Brian Flynn of Brian E. Flynn Consulting Engineer. ELEVATOR CONSULTANT: Scott Hayes of Hubert H. Hayes Elevator Consulting. BUILDING ENGINEER: James Blum of Joseph K. Blum Company.