Only five firms bid the elevator modernization at 2 Lafayette Street, and the spread between them is enormous for a job this size. Gramercy Group Inc came in at $16,188,000 — apparent low, and $4.36 million under the second bid from CLS Project Solutions Inc at $20,545,357.47. The top bid, a joint venture between Scalamandre and TEI, hit $26,194,959. That's a 26.9% spread from top to bottom, on a five-bid field, for elevator work inside one city-owned office building in the Financial District.
A spread that wide with that few bidders usually means the drawings are being read very differently by different estimators — modernizing elevators in an occupied city building means shutdown sequencing, phasing around tenant agencies, code-driven equipment swaps, and asbestos or lead protocols that older buildings almost always carry. Five bidders is also a thin field for a $16-26 million contract, which tells you this isn't a job every elevator contractor in the city wanted to chase; vertical transportation modernization at this scale takes bonding capacity and crews that not many shops carry at once.
Gramercy's number being nearly a quarter below the next bid is the kind of gap that gets a second look during DCAS's review — not because it's wrong, but because a bid that far under the field either found real savings the competition missed, or missed something the competition priced in. That review is still open; this is not an award, and DCAS's bid tab explicitly frames it as subject to the city's review process.
For contractors watching the vertical transportation market in city-owned buildings, this tab is worth filing away. A five-firm field on a job this size says the pool of shops willing and able to bid DCAS elevator modernizations at nine-figure-adjacent scale is small — which is either a warning about how hard it is to compete here, or an opening for a firm with the bonding to get in.