How did we find a space with double height ceilings in Manhattan?
Several people have come up to me and asked why there is a building in the FiDi district with 20+ high ceilings? And well – if you’re a little geeky like me – it’s sort of an interesting story.
Our FiDi location is on the 14th floor of a large building (100 Pearl Street which used to be 7 Hanover Square) – and the 14th floor is pretty much exactly in the middle of the building. So why would anyone put a double height floor in there? Why wouldn’t you put two floors – you could make more money by renting them both out (rather than just one). No one is going to pay double the rent for double the ceiling height! (And no – they weren’t thinking about squash courts back then.) The answer is HVAC (Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning). When the building was first built 50 years ago, the HVAC for the entire building was put in the middle. That way it could be distributed easily across the entire space. Nice and central. And those machines were HUGE. So big in fact that they didn’t fit on one floor and so they built a double-height floor to accommodate these monsters. Fast forward several decades and we can now do the same thing with vastly less footprint. So when the owners of the building were refurbishing it, they found that the new HVAC equipment needed less than one third of the footprint and they magically had a *mostly* empty double-height floor to rent out!
I’ve put this video together to give you a wee tour.
For those who would prefer just a pic – check this out below! The dark blue areas are now all that’s needed to heat and cool the *entire* building. When it was built the same equipment took up the entire (double height) floor.
