We provided preconstruction and construction phase services to the owners of the existing 36-story 580 Fifth Avenue building - an office building in the heart of the jewelry district in midtown Manhattan. The scope of the work was to install three new elevators in a new 36-story core attached to the existing tower. The goal of the project was to connect the disjointed nature of the tower and its low-rise annex at the north end of the building with a central elevator service, as well as to provide faster service to the office tenants on the upper floors. The immense complexity of our task involved doing all required addition and invasive interior renovation work while all of the existing building tenants and their customers maintained their very active work pace and ensured that their operations functioned normally and safely.

580 Fifth Avenue was originally designed as a typical NYC high-rise office building in the 1920's. "Typical" meant that the assumed program was for anywhere from several to half a dozen office tenants per floor in the tower. As the "Diamond District" grew, 580 Fifth Avenue became the home to a growing contingent of diamond dealers.

The nature of the diamond dealing business involves a high amount of person-to-person interaction, requiring a much higher pedestrian/visitor traffic flow into and out of these dealers' facilities. The typical diamond dealer space includes a small administrative/record-keeping space, an area where diamonds are inspected and cut, and a "sally-port" vestibule component providing glazed and lockable access to these other areas. There are as many as a dozen diamond dealers with this type of facility on each tower floor.

Ultimately, the level of traffic far exceeded the original design assumptions for determining the number and speed of the original elevators. The current building function and tenant/visitor population mandated that additional elevators would be required to allow for the increased vertical transportation load in order to reduce elevator wait time and accommodate all of the people using the building. The design team was charged by the owner with creating a design that maintained the integrity of the existing pre-war building.

Our project team successfully managed this project by coordinating all work with the building management staff on a daily basis to minimize disruptions to the continuous floor-to-floor movement of people bartering and selling diamonds and other pieces of jewelry. The team was able to keep a safe, secure accident and incident free working environment during construction, and we were able to complete the work within the constraints of the existing budget and delivered the project on time.