The Flatiron Building Is Now Apartments. The Cheapest One Is $11M.

A Building With More Lives Than a Gilded Cat

The Flatiron has been a lot of things over the years. A commercial office building. A tourist magnet. A symbol of early skyscraper ambition. For a brief, chaotic period around the turn of the last century, it was also apparently a street-level menace that blew unsuspecting messenger boys into traffic and lifted the skirts of women while groups of men loitered specifically to watch it happen.

Now, according to the Guardian, it is entering what its owners are calling a new era: luxury residential. The Brodsky Organization, which owns the building, has spent years and presumably an ungodly amount of money converting the Beaux-Arts landmark into 36 apartments. Some span entire floors. The top floor is five bedrooms, five bathrooms, a sauna, two dressing rooms, a dining room, a separate breakfast room, and a 72-foot "great room." Fourteen units are already in contract.

The building also has a pool, a games room with a billiards table, and a double-height lobby, because when you're spending $11 million minimum on an apartment, you presumably want to feel like you're checking into a hotel every time you come home from the farmer's market.

The Part Where They Exposed the Steel Skeleton

The interiors were handled by what the Guardian describes as a "venerated New York design firm," which stripped back the Flatiron's guts to expose what the press materials are calling the building's "steel skeleton." The interior steel frame was cutting-edge technology when the building went up in 1902. Now it's a design feature for people who can spend $58.5 million on a place to sleep.

Images shared with the Guardian show a four-bedroom unit with a curved sofa positioned at the building's famous "prow" — the sharpest angle of the triangular structure, pointed like the bow of a very expensive ship aimed directly at Fifth Avenue. There is marble. There is brushed steel. There is the very specific aesthetic energy of a place where someone spent more on the kitchen fixtures than most Americans will earn in a lifetime.

Daniel Brodsky, the managing partner of the Brodsky Organization, told the Financial Times that taking on a landmark building like this comes with hesitation but also advantages. "It has an incredibly special character that makes it worth the pain," he said, which is a remarkably relatable thing to say about a building that will house thirty-six households in a city with over 70,000 people sleeping on the street on any given night.

Jeff Bezos Is Apparently Nearby, in Case You Were Wondering

Brodsky also told the Financial Times that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and sentient yacht collection, has spent more than $100 million buying several properties three blocks north of the Flatiron. This was offered as a selling point. The Guardian noted, with appropriate deadpan, that Brodsky's description of the neighborhood as being associated with "coolness" may be the first time Bezos' name has appeared in the same sentence as that word.

The surrounding area, Brodsky said, offers "good transportation, the best restaurants in the city, the park." He described it as "a very easy place to live" and added, without apparent irony, "you're surrounded by coolness." This is all technically true and also a perfect encapsulation of how the luxury real estate pitch has learned to speak in the language of neighborhood charm while pricing out every single person who made the neighborhood charming in the first place.

A Brief History of This Building Almost Killing People

The Flatiron was designed by Daniel Burnham, the most sought-after architect of the Gilded Age, and was originally called the Fuller Building. That name died quickly. The building was initially derided as a folly and genuinely feared as a structural disaster — the conventional wisdom being that something so narrow had no business being that tall and would eventually tip over into Broadway.

It did not tip over. During a 60-mile-per-hour windstorm shortly after the first tenants moved in, author Alice Alexiou writes in The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It, you "couldn't feel the slightest vibration in the building." What the building did do was create what locals called the "Flatiron breeze" — a powerful localized wind produced by its triangular shape that blew, as Alexiou writes, "total strangers into each other's arms, causing much embarrassment." It also, in a genuinely tragic incident, blew a 14-year-old messenger boy named John McTaggert into the middle of Fifth Avenue, where he was struck by a car and died.

The BBC reported that for the building's renovation, a specialist was brought in to replicate and restore "thousands of terra-cotta pieces from the facade, reinstalling each by hand." The lion heads and eagles that decorate the limestone and terra-cotta exterior have been painstakingly restored. It is, by all accounts, a serious and careful piece of historic preservation. You just have to be a billionaire to live inside it.

Who Actually Lives Here

According to Corcoran's website, as the Guardian found, 14 of the 36 units are already in contract. The math on that is clarifying: the building went from scaffolding to sold-out-in-progress before most New Yorkers even registered that it was happening.

New York City's median household income is roughly $75,000. The cheapest Flatiron apartment costs $10,950,000. That's 146 years of median income. The penthouse at $58.5 million is 780 years. This is not editorializing. This is arithmetic. The city has roughly 80,000 homeless residents on any given night, and its most famous building is becoming a 36-unit enclave for people who consider $11 million a starter budget.

The Flatiron Building will open to residents later this fall. The scaffolding is coming down. The restoration is complete. And New York's skyline will look exactly like it always has, which is to say, gorgeous, and increasingly designed for people who don't actually need to live anywhere in particular.