Rise in renovations complements city's new construction

NEW YORK -- Construction cranes, an endangered species on the New York City skyline only a few years ago, have returned to roost. The yammer of rivet guns and the hiss of arc welders fills the air as new steel frames rise.

But the revival of new construction is only part of the story. Less visible, but taking up a larger role in the city's construction mix than ever before, is the renovation of the buildings that are already here.

From the Empire State Building, where tons of limestone are being stitched onto the building's skin, to the office buildings of Wall Street that are being converted into apartments, the city is quietly rebuilding its interiors and exteriors. There are no hard numbers about how many people are employed in renovation work, since state and federal surveys do not differentiate among construction workers. But numbers from the New York City Department of Buildings and anecdotal evidence suggest that while new construction has revived from its low point during the recession of the early 1990s, renovation work -- pushed by tax incentives, changing tastes and altered economics -- has grown even faster. In fact, the number of applications for new buildings in 1997 was only about one-third of the total in 1989, when new construction in New York peaked, according to the Department of Buildings. Yet employment in the construction industry has come back strongly, to nearly 80 percent of its 1989 peak. The growth in alterations, renovations and restorations partly explains why. The number of applications for such work is up 18.3 percent in the last four years, and the volume of restoration work on buildings covered by the city's landmarks laws has risen even faster -- up 50 percent since 1993 alone, and more than double the level of a decade ago, according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission. The Board of Education is even considering a special vocational high school to teach the restoration arts. "The vision of the school would be a place where young people could learn preservation skills -- why paint changes color over time, why arches don't fall," said Kenneth Fisher, a city council member from Brooklyn who is backing the school plan. "The craftsman of the next century is going to need these skills." In a city that has tended to treat the present -- not to mention the past -- as an obstacle to building an ever larger and grander city, the implications of this shift are profound. Knocking down a building in the 1990s to make way for a new one doesn't make as much economic sense as it once did, builders say. Preserving and renovating has become increasingly viable and profitable. "The fact is, the market is really not strong enough to support new construction, except in unique locations," said Thomas Elghanayan, the president of Rockrose Development, one of the city's largest developers. "And because of zoning changes, what's already there usually exceeds what you could put back if you tore it down anyway." Like the economic restructuring that has swept through many other industries in recent years, the shifting construction mix in New York means adjustment. Workers may need to re-educate themselves, and in some cases, relearn the skills of their grandfathers. "We're trying to teach these kids how to do it right, which means, how they used to do it," said Shaun McGloin, a bricklayer for 25 years before he switched to restoration in the 1980s. He now teaches the new/old skills at the International Masonry Institute, a hands- on training academy in Queens run by his union, the Bricklayers and Allied Craftworkers International. "You try and think like they did back then," McGloin said. "What was a guy thinking when he did this a hundred years ago?" This is Luis Arango's world. Arango, a 23-year-old native of Colombia, climbed aboard his first scaffold as an apprentice masonry renovator last month at the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of St. Sava on 26th Street in Manhattan. His job was to repoint the bricks -- apply new mortar between the spaces to restore both the strength and appearance of the wall. But what he realized when he got there, he said, suspended high above the street, was that the work's significance went beyond mixing stone and sand and mortar. He was standing in a place where no one had been, in all probability, since the day some anonymous bricklayer stood there before the Civil War. "They told me nobody had touched these bricks in 150 years," Arango said, his voice filled with awe. "I felt like an artist up there." Builders and architects say that a city law passed in 1980 requiring property owners to regularly inspect and maintain buildings over six stories in height gave the renovation business a boost. And the city's efforts in the 1990s to rejuvenate the Wall Street area through tax breaks for restoring or converting old commercial buildings to new uses also helped. At the same time, many architects and builders, battered by a collapse of new construction during the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, were looking for new sources of revenue. Changing tastes also contributed. Some Manhattan companies of the so-called new media Internet industry, for example, have said that old buildings have the image they want for their hip young offices, and many will not rent space in the austerely functional boxes of commerce built in more recent years. Satisfying that new demand means creating what is in many cases a whole different order of labor. Where new construction is based on teamwork and speed and giant pieces of steel and blueprints coming hot off an architect's drafting table, renovation is often small and detailed and to a great degree, even personal work. Blueprints mostly don't exist. That means workers, architects and engineers have to try, as best they can, to imagine what was intended by the original builders, so that it can reproduced or repaired. Archaeology and respect for the past coexist with seat-of-the- pants improvisation. Sometimes, workers say, there are no tools to repair something that was created by an anonymous artisan of the past. A teaspoon, for example, when ground down to a point, makes a good wedge for inserting mortar between very old bricks. And now the skill requirements are about to change again. Newer buildings, constructed after World War II and now beginning to enter their middle age, used entirely different materials from the iron and stone high-rise structures built before the war. "These buildings are just starting to reach the age of reckoning," said Joan Gerner, a vice president and director of the preservation division at Lehrer McGovern Bovis, a large construction management firm in Manhattan that created for the first time in the 1990s a special division to focus on restoration and renovation work.

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