Abramovich’s apartment several floors below the leak, causing an estimated $500,000 in damage, she said. Czarnecki said he was “not at liberty to comment.”Īfter the first incident, water seeped into Ms. Four days later, a “water line failure” on the 74th floor caused water to enter elevator shafts, removing two of the four residential elevators from service for weeks.īoth events occurred on mechanical floors that have been criticized for being excessively tall - a design feature that allowed the developers to build higher than would otherwise have been permitted, because mechanical floors do not count against the building’s allowable size. 22, was caused by a “blown” flange, a ribbed collar that connects piping, around a high-pressure water feed on the 60th floor. There have been a number of floods in the building, including two leaks in November 2018 that the general manager of the building, Len Czarnecki, acknowledged in emails to residents. “That’s how I went up to my hoity-toity apartment before closing.” “They put me in a freight elevator surrounded by steel plates and plywood, with a hard-hat operator,” she said. She was disappointed with her purchase on day one, she said, when she left her home in London in early 2016 to move into what she expected to be a completed apartment, and found that both her unit and the building were still under construction. Abramovich and her husband, Mikhail, retired business owners who worked in the oil and gas business, bought a high-floor, 3,500-square-foot apartment at the tower for nearly $17 million in 2016, to have a secondary home near their adult children. The construction manager, Lendlease, said in a statement that they “have been in contact” with the developers, “regarding some comments from tenants, which we are currently evaluating.” Macklowe Properties, the other developer, declined to comment. (Developers typically control condo boards in the first few years of operation.) “Like all new construction, there were maintenance and close-out items during that period,” they said. Engineers privy to some of the disputes say many of the same issues are occurring quietly in other new towers.ĬIM Group, one of the developers, said in a statement that the building “is a successfully designed, constructed and virtually sold-out project,” and that they are “working collaboratively” with the condo board, which was run by the developers until January when residents were elected and took control. Less than a decade after a spate of record-breaking condo towers reached new heights in New York, the first reports of defects and complaints are beginning to emerge, raising concerns that some of the construction methods and materials used have not lived up to the engineering breakthroughs that only recently enabled 1,000-foot-high trophy apartments. The claims include millions of dollars of water damage from plumbing and mechanical issues frequent elevator malfunctions and walls that creak like the galley of a ship - all of which may be connected to the building’s main selling point: its immense height, according to homeowners, engineers and documents obtained by The New York Times. Six years later, residents of the exclusive tower are now at odds with the developers, and each other, making clear that even multimillion-dollar price tags do not guarantee problem-free living. The nearly 1,400-foot tower at 432 Park Avenue, briefly the tallest residential building in the world, was the pinnacle of New York’s luxury condo boom half a decade ago, fueled largely by foreign buyers seeking discretion and big returns.

Downside supertall leaks creaks breaks