New York City
Concrete Cutting and Removal in New York City
Slab openings, shaft and stair penetrations, trenching, pads, curbs and topping slabs across all five boroughs. Cut to a line, broken down to what the route out can carry, and taken away.
Cutting is the easy half
A concrete saw will cut almost anything you point it at. The part that decides whether a job is straightforward or difficult is what happens to the material afterwards.
Concrete is heavy in a way nothing else in a demolition scope is. A square metre of a slab a hundred and fifty millimetres thick weighs more than a person, and once it is cut free it has to be lifted, carried, and moved out of a building that was not designed with that in mind. So the first thing we work out is not where the cut goes. It is how the pieces leave.
That answer sets the size of the pieces, which sets the pattern of the cuts, which sets how long the work takes. Plan it in that order and a slab opening is a clean two-day job. Plan it the other way and you end up with a floor full of sections nobody can move.
The work covers openings through slabs for stairs, shafts, lifts and risers, penetrations for mechanical and electrical trades, trenching for drainage and services, breaking out old machine pads and housekeeping curbs, topping slabs, cellar and basement floors, steps and yard slabs.
The route out, five ways
01 The tower and the loft
Down through a freight car
Above the ground floor in Manhattan, Downtown Brooklyn or Long Island City, every piece leaves in a lift with a stated capacity, in hours the building releases. The capacity is the ceiling on piece size, and the hours are the ceiling on how many pieces a day.
Both are known before we cut, which is why the cut pattern is drawn on the walk-through rather than improvised on the day.
02 The walk-up and the brownstone
Up a cellar stair, out over a stoop
A cellar slab in a row house or a brownstone comes out through the hatch or up a narrow stair and over the stoop. That means small pieces, more of them, and a protected route from the cellar to the curb.
It is the most labour-heavy version of this work in the city and it is completely predictable once the route has been walked.
03 The house and the yard
Straight out to the container
Where there is a driveway or a yard, sections can be larger, machinery can get closer, and the container is standing where the work is. A back yard slab or an old boiler pad in a house is the simplest concrete job available in New York.
The constraint that remains is the neighbour, so the noisy breaking gets grouped rather than spread across a week.
04 The dock
Where none of this applies
Industrial and warehouse space in the South Bronx, Red Hook, Sunset Park and western Queens has a dock and a roll-up door. Piece size stops being a constraint and the job becomes what people imagine concrete work is.
It is worth saying so plainly, because it is the one case where the price is decided by the concrete rather than by the building.
A stripped floor with the columns exposed
Where structure stops being ours
Cutting an opening through a floor slab removes something that was carrying load. Whether that matters, and what has to be added back, belongs to an engineer, not to a contractor, and it is made before anyone cuts.
On anything structural a registered engineer or architect designs the opening and its support and files with the Department of Buildings. The permit issues before the saw arrives. We execute the design and we do not substitute for the person who produced it.
Say what you are planning early. The design and filing carry a real lead time, and on more than one project that lead time is the entire difference between a start date that holds and one that moves.
Working inside an occupied building
Concrete work makes four things people notice, and each one is managed, not tolerated.
Water. Wet cutting keeps dust down and keeps the blade alive, and it produces slurry that has to be contained. The area is bermed and the water is picked up as it is made, so nothing reaches the floor below or the finishes staying in the space.
Dust. Where cutting has to be dry, extraction runs at the blade and the area stays sealed. Drilling, breaking and chasing are the operations that fill a corridor if nobody plans for them.
Vibration. Breaking transmits through a structure much further than the noise suggests, so on an occupied floor the work is sequenced and the people below are told when it is happening.
Noise. The loudest hours get grouped into windows the building agrees rather than spread across a whole week. In a mixed-use building with apartments above a shop, this is usually the constraint that shapes the programme.
Common questions
Can you cut concrete inside an occupied building?
Yes. In New York that is where most of it happens.
It changes how the work is run. It does not change whether it can happen. The area is sealed and protected, cutting is wet where wet cutting is possible, slurry is contained and collected as it appears, and the noisy and high-vibration operations are grouped into the hours the building agrees. Neighbours and tenants below are told what is happening and when.
We agree all of that with you and the managing agent before the first cut, not after the first complaint.
How do you keep the dust down?
By not creating it where that is possible, and by capturing it at the tool where it is not.
Wet cutting is the main answer, because water at the blade stops silica dust becoming airborne in the first place. Where the work has to be dry, extraction runs at the point of cut and the work area is sealed off with dust separation rather than a sheet taped to a door frame.
The rest is housekeeping that never stops: the route in and out stays protected, material is bagged as it is produced, and the space is cleared down at the end of every shift instead of at the end of the job.