At Empire State Building, a 40th Floor Squatter

By MANNY FERNANDEZ

Published: September 21, 2010

Daniel K. Perlman had the quietest, cheapest and strangest office in New York City. It was quiet because he had a deserted six-room suite to himself; cheap because he paid zero in rent; and strange because he had all of this on the 40th floor of one of the most famous skyscrapers in the world.

For about seven months, he was a squatter at the Empire State Building.

Mr. Perlman, 47, is a family-law and criminal defense lawyer. In a city of fame and power, he has neither. He used to be a school teacher in Pennsylvania. Now he lives on the Upper West Side, enjoys crossword puzzles and runs in marathons.

In 2006, Mr. Perlman moved his one-man law practice to Suite 4010 of the Empire State Building. A few other companies occupied the suite, a narrow cluster of rooms in the southwest corner of the building with stunning views. His desk and chair were tucked into a little alcove near the break room.

The tenant of Suite 4010 was a mortgage broker, which rented out rooms to other businesses, including a law firm, which in turn rented the space to Mr. Perlman. He had no lease with the mortgage broker and no lease with the building’s owners, operators or leasing agent. In fact, Mr. Perlman said he did not have a lease with the law firm, but had an informal agreement. Because he had done work for the law firm, he was allowed to use the alcove for little or no rent. He said he was initially charged no rent and later paid $500 a month.

As the housing market collapsed, the mortgage broker struggled and left the suite in July 2009. The other businesses departed around the same time. Mr. Perlman looked into moving to a new office. He said he waited for one of the eviction notices that management taped to the doors of other vacant suites, but one never came.

“I was prepared to leave, but nothing happened,” Mr. Perlman said. “There was no green notice on the door. At the same time, nobody from the Empire State Building hassled me about it. The maintenance people knew I was there.”

Hundreds of feet above Manhattan, Mr. Perlman had slipped through the real-estate cracks of New York, working on his legal cases in his very own 3,000-square-foot suite in the Empire State Building, free of rent and office colleagues. He spread out, taking over one of the vacant rooms. When his original identification card was deactivated, he got a second one with the help of a friend in the building, using an ID for the 59th floor, where he intended to relocate, to gain access to the 40th floor.

One afternoon last November, Mr. Perlman stepped into what used to be the conference room. The room was empty, except for a photocopy machine upon which someone had taped a note: “Copier is trash.”

It was a ghost of a suite. Most of the rooms were barren, but fragments of office life remained — unplugged fax machines, a pouch of Fairway French roast coffee on a shelf. The digital clock on the microwave in the break room was 1 hour 28 minutes off.

“I still get mail,” he said at the time. “It’s odd.”

Mr. Perlman said he did not consider himself a squatter or law-breaker. Yet he had no sympathy for the building’s management, which he complained had been trying to push out small tenants to make way for larger tenants. The mortgage broker was one of several small tenants that sued the Empire State Building over their electricity bills. “I didn’t think of it as a scam,” Mr. Perlman said. “If I’m guilty of anything, I’m guilty of procrastinating.”

In February, Mr. Perlman walked into the suite to find his desk and the rest of the furniture had been removed. The locks were changed soon after.

A spokesman for the Empire State Building said Mr. Perlman was an illegal subtenant who found a way to gain access to the building unlawfully after his ID card was deactivated, and that management had been delayed in taking possession of Suite 4010 because their eviction case against the mortgage broker for nonpayment of rent was tied up in court. The spokesman said that illegal subtenancies were once common, when the building was under different management, but that steps had been taken to put an end to the practice.

After working from home for several months, Mr. Perlman found a new office on West 37th Street and began moving in this week. Suite 4010 remains vacant.

Jim Dwyer is on leave.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/nyregion/22about.html?_r=1