One Wall Street Residential Conversion, New York

Ralph Walker’s limestone Irving Trust tower opened on March 24, 1931, as a bank headquarters. In March 2023 it was officially finished as 566 condominiums. The One Wall Street residential conversion covered nearly 1.2 million square feet and was the largest office-to-residential conversion New York City had seen.

Macklowe Properties bought the building from BNY Mellon in May 2014 for $585 million. Harry Macklowe first planned a mix of offices and rentals. In early 2017 he switched to almost entirely condos, since a building owned by its residents would need less debt.

Project Scope

Turning a 1931 office floor into apartments meant moving the elevators. The original banks sat near the perimeter walls, eating the space next to the windows. Macklowe removed 20 upper-floor elevators and added 10 new ones in the core, taking out 34 elevators and 16 escalators in all, and built new stairs. Interior demolition wrapped in November 2018, the same month a $750 million Deutsche Bank construction loan closed.

SLCE Architects took over the design from Robert A.M. Stern Architects, and Deborah Berke Partners (now TenBerke) was among the firms that redesigned parts of the building. JT Magen replaced Gilbane Building Company as general contractor in 2017. Facade repairs used stone from the same quarry that supplied Walker’s original building. Eight stories went onto the south annex, a glass retail addition rose along Broadway, and the third floor came out to give the retail floors more height.

The base filled up slowly. Whole Foods opened in January 2023 and Life Time took 74,000 square feet over the lowest four floors. Printemps opened in March 2025, including a shoe salon in the Red Room banking hall, whose mosaic had been restored with tiles that sat in storage, unused, since the building went up.

Why It Matters

One Wall Street is the conversion everybody cites, and it’s an honest test case. The engineering worked. The sales didn’t keep up.

Macklowe took a $300 million inventory loan in October 2023, when 479 of 566 units were unsold and the project had cost $2.9 billion to date. By November 2024 the New York Post reported only 112 closings, about $230 million against a projected $1.7 billion sellout.

For anyone underwriting the next wave of office-to-residential projects, that’s the takeaway. A landmark shell and a clever core rework solve the building problem. They don’t set the price, and a Financial District already long on new units won’t absorb 566 luxury condos on a developer’s timetable.

Project Team & Details