Nathan Berman, a key developer behind the Midtown Manhattan building that became dangerously unstable this week, has never built a building from the ground up.
Since entering real estate in the 1990s, he has worked exclusively on projects that transform existing structures into high-end residences, converting Art Deco office towers, a book factory and a former pharmaceutical headquarters into apartments.
And until Tuesday morning, when two columns inside the former Pfizer office building began buckling, hardly anyone outside of New York’s notoriously insular real estate community had ever heard of him.
Mr. Berman, professionals in the New York real estate industry said, liked it that way. In a city where real estate developers are often brands themselves, known as much for their flashy, cutthroat personalities as their properties, Mr. Berman has kept a low profile.
“Most of the developers I know all have some sort of personality disorder, and that’s why they got as far as they did,” said Jonathan Miller, a prominent New York real estate appraiser. “But Berman doesn’t really have a reputation.”
Mr. Berman, through a representative, declined a request for comment on Friday and said he would no longer be giving interviews about the Pfizer building. The other developer on the project, David Werner Real Estate, did not answer reporters’ phone calls.
New York City investigators and Manhattan prosecutors have opened a preliminary criminal inquiry into what happened on Tuesday, according to a city official and a person with knowledge of the matter. There was no indication on Friday that Mr. Berman was a target.
He moved to the United States from what is now Ukraine in 1973, when he was 14, he has said in many interviews. YouTube videos show he still speaks with a whisper of an accent. His father survived Nazi concentration camps and worked in a factory as a fabric cutter when they arrived in the United States, while his mother stayed home.
They settled in Kew Gardens, a middle-class enclave in Queens, and Mr. Berman picked up jobs as a paperboy. America, he told the Real Deal, a real estate trade publication, amazed him.
“I couldn’t believe the tube socks,” he said in the 2017 interview. “How could they be so clean, so white? They didn’t have Tide in Russia.”
In 2023, in an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Berman reflected on his rise in real estate.
“To be involved with spectacular landmarks in New York City — it’s probably difficult for you guys to get the sense of what that meant and means to me,” he said. “It’s like the idea of owning a piece of the Empire State Building, for a kid coming here from nowhere.”
Today, Mr. Berman, 67, controls a real estate empire worth billions of dollars. But Mr. Berman worked as a taxi driver, pulling shifts behind the wheel while putting himself through school at Queens College, where he studied accounting. He married his wife, Liza, at 20, and spent the next 15 years helping her father, Eduard Nakhamkin, at his Russian art gallery on Madison Avenue. He was well into his 30s when he entered real estate.
The handful of media interviews he has given over the years have focused on his success as the founder of MetroLoft, a leading New York City developer that has been one of the most active companies in the office-to-residential conversion space over the last several decades.
Crain’s once called him “The King of FiDi” because of the amount of projects he led in the Financial District in Lower Manhattan. It was an accolade he said he would have preferred to avoid.
“Ego is the most expensive thing that most people can’t afford,” he told the Real Deal.
But Mr. Berman and his firm have also been the subject of recent scrutiny.
One of MetroLoft’s best-known projects is its conversion of a 19th-century factory in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan into a glamorous condominium. Since 2016, it has attracted so many A-list celebrity buyers that it has been nicknamed the “celebrity dormitory.” Those buyers included Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, Meg Ryan, Jennifer Lawrence and Jake Gyllenhaal. Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds still live there; Harry Styles does, too.
Mr. Berman himself owns there. Eleonora Srugo, a luxury real estate agent with Douglas Elliman, was representing a buyer in 2015 who wanted a unit with high ceilings on the building’s third floor. They were close to closing the deal, she said, when Mr. Berman opted not to sell and instead live in the unit himself.
“He really screwed us,” she said.
That same buyer ended up purchasing a fifth-floor apartment from actor and comedian Mike Myers, who sold his own unit in 2017 for $14 million. Ms. Srugo closed the sale.
But that building, a former bookbindery at 443 Greenwich Street, is embroiled in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit, in which residents have claimed that the conversion was poorly executed, which has led to a number of issues, including leaks and loose brick on the facade. Mr. Berman is a defendant in the suit. The plaintiffs are seeking at least $30 million in damages, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.
The lawsuit focuses largely on what the residents called defects in the construction of the penthouse level — a brand-new addition built on top of the more than 140-year-old building.
“As a result of the Sponsor Defendants’ shoddy construction, the penthouses’ roof and walls are literally falling apart, just five years after the Sponsor Defendants supposedly completed the renovation of the building,” according to the condo board’s complaint. The lawsuit is still open.
At 235 East 42nd Street, the former Pfizer building, signs also point to problems with new construction above the existing structure.
Earlier this week, Mr. Berman said himself that the buckling of columns at the 42nd Street office conversion was caused by new construction above the existing building. Mr. Berman has been communicating with investors since Tuesday, reassuring them that the project will be finished in 2027 with minor delays, according to two people who asked not to be named because of the sensitive nature of the talks.
His spokeswoman, Katherine Curkin, said the development team has been “working closely with the Department of Buildings to rectify the situation” and that the problems remain a “localized situation,” affecting only 30 of the roughly 1,600 apartments under construction.
Ryan Serhant, the founder and chief executive of the New York brokerage SERHANT, has worked closely with Mr. Berman and had only praise for the developer in an interview on Friday. “There are a lot of issues in every new construction building,” he said, describing concerns about the Pfizer building’s stability, and MetroLoft as a company, as overblown.
Mr. Berman, he said, “is a developer’s developer. He is Martin Scorsese. He doesn’t do a movie every year. He’s not chasing all the shiny new stories. He puts the projects first.”
Santul Nerkar contributed reporting, and Susan Campbell Beachy contributed research.