Plumber in Hell's Kitchen
and Midtown West.

Walk west from Sixth Avenue and the buildings get older, not newer. Five- and six-storey tenements from the 1900s and 1910s sit next to postwar white-brick, which sits next to glass towers on 42nd. A single block can hold three different eras of plumbing, and a contractor who only knows one of them will be guessing on the other two.

In the prewar stock the recurring problem is original galvanised supply, now eighty years past its service life and closing up from the inside. Pressure drops on the top floor first, which is why the top-floor tenant is usually the one who calls. The fix is a riser replacement, not another descaling.

The cast iron waste stacks in those same buildings are reaching end of life together, which is why one leak is rarely one leak. On the commercial side, ground-floor restaurants along Ninth and Tenth put grease into drainage that was designed for apartments — the resulting blockages sit under someone's living room.