Lifestyle

A Bad Office Can (Potentially) Become a Good Apartment

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Two things are inarguably true in New York City right now: A lot of older office buildings are underoccupied because of the shift to remote work, and the housing market is as tight and overheated as ever. The obvious answer is to convert one kind of skyscraper into the other, but that’s not always as easy as it sounds, especially when it comes to the big slab towers of the 1960s and later. Nonetheless, a few developers are doing it in lower Manhattan, and Justin Davidson, our superlative architecture critic, looked deep within their windowless, kitchenless, fluorescent-lit cores to find out how workable these projects are. Among his discoveries: units that are being offered as “studio apartments” with two “home offices” that legally cannot be called bedrooms but could, mysteriously and theoretically, end up slept in. You might even want one of these places for yourself.

—Christopher Bonanos, city editor, New York

A Bad Office Can (Potentially) Become a Good Apartment The challenges and complexities of cubicles out, bedrooms in.

25 Water Street, now under reconstruction. Photo: Hugo Yu
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