Manhattan
Window Restoration in Manhattan
Beaux-Arts apartment houses, Italianate townhouses and cast-iron lofts — restored under heavy Landmarks oversight, with the co-op and condo board process handled alongside the filing.
The districts we work in
Manhattan concentrates more Landmarks oversight into less ground than anywhere else in the city, and the work reflects that. We restore windows across the Upper West Side / Central Park West Historic District, the Greenwich Village Historic District, the Upper East Side Historic District, Harlem and Hamilton Heights, Mount Morris Park, Murray Hill, Ladies’ Mile and Tribeca.
Two things follow from that geography. First, a high proportion of Manhattan buildings are either individually designated or sit inside a district, which means the permit question is usually answered before we arrive — the work needs a Landmarks filing. Second, a great deal of Manhattan’s historic housing is held in common: the decision-maker is a co-op or condo board, not a single owner, and the scope has to survive a board process as well as a Landmarks review.
Beaux-Arts, Italianate, and cast iron
Manhattan’s window stock divides fairly cleanly into three problems.
Pre-war apartment houses — Beaux-Arts and Renaissance Revival, the buildings that give Central Park West and West End Avenue their scale. Large, tall double-hung sash, often with elaborate brickmould and casing profiles, at heights that make every intervention a rigging question. These are usually large buildings by Landmarks’ own definition — seven storeys or more, or 40 feet or more of frontage — which changes what the rules permit on material at a primary facade.
Italianate and Romanesque Revival townhouses — the rowhouse blocks of the Village, Murray Hill, Mount Morris Park and Hamilton Heights. Smaller buildings, and Landmarks treats them more strictly on material precisely because they are small: six storeys or fewer and under 40 feet of frontage puts a building in the category where material has to match at the primary facade.
Cast-iron lofts — Tribeca and Ladies’ Mile, where the structural frame is iron and the windows are enormous by residential standards, frequently steel-framed, and were designed to flood a manufacturing floor with daylight. Replacing steel sections with anything thicker eats measurable daylight opening, which is exactly what LPC’s glazing diminution caps — 6% for wood, 10% for metal — exist to control.
Building-wide programmes and the board
The characteristic Manhattan project is not one window. It is a pre-war co-op running a building-wide window programme: eighty, a hundred and fifty, two hundred openings, several elevations, a mix of conditions, a capital budget approved at a board meeting, and Landmarks reviewing the whole thing as one application.
Those projects succeed or fail on the survey. We record every opening individually, tag it, assign it a scope of refurbish or replace, and photograph it — which gives the board a defensible basis for the capital number and gives Landmarks the per-unit documentation the rules require. It also means the mixed-scope reality of a real building gets filed as mixed scope: some windows refurbished in kind, some replaced in kind, documented differently, in one package.
We have filed exactly that way on an individual landmark in Manhattan — a Dorilton apartment where seven windows were refurbished in kind and nine replaced in kind, with an outside architect as architect of record and HM named as window contractor. Where a building has no architect engaged, we file directly.
Work already on the record
Our Manhattan portfolio includes more than 70 windows at The Dorilton, one of the city’s most ornate Beaux-Arts landmarks. Boards and architects we have worked with put it better than we would:
HM’s craftsmanship on our windows was extraordinary. They understood the building’s history and treated every detail with the care a landmark deserves.
Professional, meticulous, and completely fluent in the LPC process. The restored windows look exactly as they should — original, but renewed.
As architects we hold our trades to a high standard. HM delivered preservation work of genuine quality and managed the approvals seamlessly.
Common Questions
Questions we get asked on this work
Our co-op is planning a building-wide window project. Where does it start?
With a per-opening survey rather than a per-building estimate. Every window is recorded, tagged, photographed and assigned a scope of refurbish or replace, because a pre-war facade is not one condition — it is a hundred conditions that share an address. That record does two jobs at once: it gives the board a defensible capital number, and it is the per-unit documentation Landmarks requires in the application.
Our building is an individual landmark, not just in a district. Is that harder?
It is stricter on two specific points. At an individual landmark the window material has to match the historic window at the primary facade regardless of the building’s size, and a conditions assessment is always required as part of the application. The named exception allowing a pivot window to become hinged also does not apply at individual landmarks.
Can we do a Manhattan window project while the building stays occupied?
Yes — that is how most of this work is done. Sash are removed, rebuilt in our Newark workshop and refitted, which keeps the noisy and dusty part off site. In any pre-1978 building the removal and refitting are carried out under EPA Lead-Safe certified containment.
Free Assessment
Get a free on-site assessment.
We visit your building, inspect the windows one by one, discuss any board or Landmarks requirements, and walk you through the options — restoration, replacement and approvals. No cost, no obligation.