The Next Life of an Iconic New York Skyscraper Is 37 Luxury Homes
Nick Mafi | Bloomberg
Bill Sofield refers to himself as an archaeologist. He is by profession, however, an interior designer, known for the stores he’s done for clients such as Tom Ford and Gucci. For the past 3½ years he’s been working inside the Flatiron Building, one of the most photographed structures in the world, turning it into 37 apartments.
When Sofield walked its first two floors, what he found was wreckage: severed cast-iron staircases that led nowhere, the bolted remains of a boiler, air handlers from another century. The building, one of New York City’s oldest surviving skyscrapers, had stood almost empty for years. His job was to turn the ruins into homes.
Designed by Daniel Burnham and built in 1902 as a construction company’s headquarters at the triangle where Fifth Avenue intersects Broadway, the Flatiron captured the popular imagination almost from the start. Alfred Stieglitz photographed the prow in the fog. Childe Hassam painted it in winter. Postcards from the first decades of the 20th century show women’s skirts lifting in the wind tunnel at the building’s base, an accident of air pressure that popularized one of the era’s more durable scraps of slang: “23 skidoo.” (That’s what police told the men loitering at the corner of 23rd Street for the view, or so it goes.) Andrew Dolkart, who teaches historic preservation at Columbia University and once worked at the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, calls the steel-framed Beaux Arts tower the first building to become a symbol of New York: “It became famous in both high culture and low.”
For 124 years the Flatiron has been celebrated by New Yorkers. Sometime late this fall, it will become home to a select few of them. Buyers have paid from $11 million to more than $50 million for units in the building, where the least expensive apartments are roughly the size of a suburban house. Sixteen of the 37 residences are under contract, according to Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group, at an average price of $19 million. Over the years the office tower has housed the pulp magazine pioneer Frank Munsey, the puppeteer Tony Sarg, the Imperial Russian Consulate and, for a half-century, Macmillan Publishers. Never residents.
The Flatiron is now one of the crown jewels of a national office-to-residential movement, alongside the Chrysler Building, another similarly storied New York landmark whose owner has publicly proposed converting it into housing. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, tens of thousands of apartments have been carved out of distressed workspaces in American cities. Most of those buildings were bought for pennies on the dollar. Troubled office towers across the country are trading for fractions of their pre-pandemic value. As the Wall Street Journal reported in April, a 485,000-square-foot building in Chicago sold for $4 million. A complex in Denver that had traded for $176 million in 2013 changed hands recently for more than $5 million. The federal government sold an office building in Washington for $24 million, a sliver of its former worth.
But the Flatiron is something different. After a long and contested auction, it sold in 2023 for a little more than $160 million. The Brodsky Organization, one of New York’s established real estate families, is leading the conversion with the Sorgente Group. Dan Brodsky chaired the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 12 years. “They consider this another way they’re giving back to New York,” says James Lansill, the Corcoran Sunshine Marketing Group executive who’s handling sales.
A permit for the Flatiron conversion listed as many as 100 units at nearly 2,000 square feet in size. To some of the building’s admirers, turning a publicly cherished landmark into just 37 private homes looks like a loss. But the choice was never between luxury housing and something more democratic. It was between luxury housing and vacancy. Office tenants had left; the building sat empty behind scaffolding while its terra-cotta was recast piece by piece. Only one kind of buyer was ever going to underwrite the cost of a project of this quality. Luxury residential conversion isn’t what happened to the Flatiron instead of preservation — it’s what saved the building.
Most office conversions strip down the building and start over. The Flatiron did the opposite. Sofield’s brief was to keep as much of the original as possible and to use the wreckage itself for the homes’ raw material. The balustrade spindles from the old staircases, for example, have been sandblasted and turned into the legs of bathroom basins. Fittings from the boilers have become decorations in the gym. In a crawl space, behind layers of plywood and drywall, Sofield found a 3-foot section of mirror and molding, the last surviving fragment of a 1,500-seat restaurant called Tavern Louie that vanished sometime in the 1920s. That scrap became the design source for the mirrored columns that will line the building’s new swimming pool in the basement, where the former restaurant’s enormous volume can still be felt.
“My parents were children of the Depression,” Sofield says. “Nothing ever got thrown out. It wasn’t because we needed to have it. It’s that it represented some kind of point in history, and it could always be used as something else. These things couldn’t just be tossed. They had to be remembered.”
The apartments themselves are modernist: Kitchens are Poliform Italian, dark metal cabinets, sleek appliances. The ceilings are high, and on the 21st floor, where the arched windows face west, late-afternoon light streams in over the Hudson River. Every window frame makes up a piece of the building’s ornament. The Flatiron’s exterior is loud and voluptuous, endowed with all the Beaux Arts flourish of 1902. The interiors are quiet. Above the residences sits a floor with no windows, only south-facing skylights, which will be folded into the penthouse when it goes to market this fall.
The case for converting the Flatiron runs deeper than sentiment: Every old building is a carbon debt already paid. The steel in the Flatiron was smelted in 1902, the terra-cotta fired and hauled and set by hand. To knock a sound building down is to throw that away and pay the debt over again for whatever replaces it. It also generates an extraordinary volume of waste. Construction and demolition debris accounts for more than half of New York City’s solid waste stream, the largest single source in the city. The greenest building, as the preservationists like to say, is the one already standing.
Picture your book nook inside the prow of the Flatiron Building.Photographer: Adrian Gaut
Frampton Tolbert, who runs the Historic Districts Council, the organization that protects the city’s historic neighborhoods, says he isn’t troubled by the Flatiron being turned into luxury housing. His organization supports conversions like this one as necessary for building housing at every level. “I don’t know that people will necessarily miss the interior,” Tolbert says. “Given that when it was commercial space, how much did people really engage with it?”
Dolkart agrees, and goes further. Adaptive reuse, he points out, has been a keystone of preservation since the movement began in New York in the late 1960s: A courthouse became the Jefferson Market Library; an immigrant aid society became the Public Theater. For most of us, Dolkart says, the Flatiron has always been an exterior object. Its public meaning is its silhouette. He guarantees that two years after the residents move in, there will be just as many tourist photographs of the building as there are now. “The Flatiron Building’s use has changed, but the meaning on the street will remain the same,” he says.
Three miles north, the Chrysler Building is a different case: Its lobby is a designated interior landmark, protected since 1978. Interior landmarks are rare in New York, with a little more than a hundred of them, and each must be publicly accessible to qualify. For decades, Dolkart brought his Columbia students into the Chrysler lobby to stand under the red marble and the painted ceiling, beside elevator doors inlaid with wood. No guard ever stopped them. Then, at some point after the Sept. 11 attacks, security tightened and the public lost the run of the space. The same thing happened at the Woolworth Building. In both cases the landmark designation remained in force. “These are great interiors,” Dolkart says. “They were meant to be public places. So that’s a loss.” Conversion isn’t what took the Chrysler lobby away from the public. Security did, while the building was still an office — and the landmark designation did nothing to prevent it.
New York has converted more office space than any other American city, and 2026 is on pace for its highest number yet. A 2024 zoning overhaul called City of Yes for Housing Opportunity widened the range of buildings eligible for conversion and stripped out barriers such as parking requirements. New York state’s tax incentive for conversions is, in Tolbert’s view, a good tool, though it reaches only certain kinds of affordable rental buildings. What the city hasn’t done, he argues, is give owners a reason to choose reuse over demolition. When the Midtown South rezoning passed last year, the city upzoned the district and allowed housing where it hadn’t been permitted before, with no incentives attached to conversion. His council supported the housing and wanted the incentives alongside it.
Tolbert has ideas about what those might look like. New York City Council Member Harvey Epstein has introduced legislation to create an Office of Conversion Assistance, which Tolbert reads as a signal that the city takes conversion seriously. He’d like to see a demolition fee, with the revenue directed toward preservation, so the waste a teardown generates is priced into the decision. And he wants a revolving fund for smaller projects, because adaptive reuse currently pencils out only for undertakings large enough to justify the cost. Which is to say, for projects like the Flatiron.
Several buyers have described the Flatiron to Corcoran Sunshine’s Lansill as their forever home. They raised their families somewhere else; the children are grown. Now these buyers are graduating, says Lansill, to what they intend to be the last home of their lives, in a tower that has stood at the corner of Fifth and Broadway since 1902.
The Flatiron was built to be looked at. It’s being remade to be lived in, and that’s what will keep it standing. The tourists will still gather in the park across 23rd Street and lift their phones, and the light will still come through the arched windows on clear afternoons, on the same diagonal it has traveled since the building was new.
