Nolita, New York City
A Demolition Company Working Across New York City
A demolition company based in Nolita, working across all five boroughs on interior jobs inside buildings that never stop running.
Based in Nolita, working the whole city
Prime Demo NY is a demolition company based at 4 Centre Market Pl, New York, NY 10013, on the edge of Little Italy and SoHo. We work across the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island.
The work is interior demolition: offices, apartments, shops, restaurants, showrooms, houses and loft space taken back to whatever the next stage needs. Alongside it we cut and remove concrete, and we clear the material we generate.
Hold space in more than one borough and it is the same people walking all of it. The estimate is written by whoever is going to be standing in the space when the work starts, and the number you agree is the one we work to.
The city rewards knowing where you are. A Staten Island house and a Midtown loft floor are two different jobs wearing the same name: one has a driveway and a container, the other has four hours of freight elevator and a managing agent. We plan each of them for what it actually is.
How we price and what we tell you
Four habits, in the order they happen.
We walk it before we price it. An estimate written from a drawing is a guess, and in older New York buildings the drawing is often describing a layout that changed twice since. We look at what is actually there, what is behind the surfaces, and how it leaves the building.
We read the building's paperwork first. The alteration agreement and the freight allocation decide the schedule more than the scope does, so we ask for them before we quote. On a house that step is the container and the block instead.
We say what we find, on the day we find it. If something behind a wall is going to change the number, you hear about it that afternoon. Surprises get more expensive the longer they are carried, and a client who is told late stops trusting everything they were told early.
We hand over what the next trade needs. When we finish you get a plain account of what was behind the walls. Your electrician and your plumber are the ones who have to deal with it, and they would rather read it than discover it.
What working in an occupied New York building actually takes
01 Day one
Protection goes in before anything comes down
In an occupied New York building the first day is not demolition. It is board on the lobby floor, corrugated on the corridor, quilts in the elevator cab, protection over a stoop or a stair, and everything staying in the space wrapped.
It is faster to protect a lobby than to repair one, and a managing agent remembers a damaged corridor far longer than a tidy one. It is also the part that decides whether the building wants the work to carry on to the end.
02 Every day after
The building is somebody's home or office
Nearly every job we take is in a building with other people in it, or on a street with neighbours who notice. Two floors up somebody is working. Next door somebody is asleep after a night shift.
So the noisy work is grouped rather than spread, the dust separation is real rather than decorative, and the material leaves on the building's schedule instead of ours. None of that is a courtesy. It is the difference between a job that finishes and one that gets stopped in week three.
Who we work with
General contractors and construction managers, architects and designers, building owners and managing agents, boards running a capital project, and commercial tenants and their contractors clearing a space at the end of a lease.
On residential work we come in as the demolition trade alongside the general contractor running the renovation.
If you are a general contractor, you mostly want to know that we will hold a date and not create a problem with the building. If you are the managing agent, you mostly want to know that your corridors, your elevator and your other tenants come out of it unaffected. Both are fair, and we try to answer them before you have to ask.