Wednesday, 10 a.m., North Central Bronx Hospital, 17th floor, Conference Room 1715. Whoever's in that room can bid this job. Whoever isn't, can't — this week's City Record bid notice for the job says it in black and white: "Only bidders who attended at least one of the following mandatory pre-bid meetings will be allowed to bid." One of the two sessions, Wednesday or Thursday. Not both. But miss both and you can hold every drawing in the package and still be locked out.
Now, what you'd be bidding on has been sitting in the city's own record for seven and a half years. DOB's facade inspection filings for BIN 2017787 go like this: Cycles 6 and 7, filed in 2011, both SWARMP — Safe With A Repair And Maintenance Program, meaning conditions that need fixing before the next cycle comes around. Cycle 8, filed January 29, 2019 off a December 2018 inspection: UNSAFE. Cycle 9, filed February 27, 2023: UNSAFE again. Two straight cycles, and seven years and seven months from that first UNSAFE report to Wednesday's meeting.
“You show up Wednesday to protect a right to bid you can't confirm you have.”
The sidewalk shed keeps the same time. DOB job X00853731, light duty, first approved April 14, 2023 — six weeks after the Cycle 9 report — and renewed through four permit sequences since. That's roughly 1,221 days of permitted pipe at a hospital, three years and four months. Careful with this next part: sequence 4 was issued May 14, 2026 carrying an expiration date of August 12, five days ago, and no renewal appears in the city's permit data as of today. We couldn't reach the agency to confirm, so that's exactly where we leave it.
Here's the part that should bother you. The notice gates who may bid before it tells anybody what they'd be bidding. No facade square footage. No window or storefront counts. No floor list, no duration, no phasing, no dollar figure. On eligibility it gives one sentence — bidding is "subject to the minimum qualifications outlined in the contract documents" — and those documents sit behind H+H's portal, which requires registration and was not publicly reachable. So you show up Wednesday to protect a right to bid you can't confirm you have.
One attendee per firm, too: "kindly limit your staff to one person at the meetings." One set of eyes on facade, glazing and site logistics, in one walk through an 18-floor, 204,200-square-foot hospital built in 1972 — about 11,300 feet a floor, per MapPLUTO. And then the ad picks a fight with itself. Up top: "Late attendees will not be accommodated." Further down, in the Bidders List paragraph: "a grace period of no more than fifteen (15) minutes will be granted to late arrivals." Same notice. Ten minutes late — dead, or fine? Nobody bidding this job can tell you, on the one document that decides whether they bid at all.
What restoration actually buys here, per those same filings: brick masonry, concrete and precast panels — Cycle 6 logged it as "CONCRETE PNL, BRIC," Cycle 9 reclassified it as masonry cavity wall over steel frame. On a 1972 wall like that, restoration means panel anchors, joint sealant and lintels. And you'll be pricing it while walking a live site: a dual 7,000-pound personnel hoist is permitted through September 30, and a separate $3.09 million interior-removals contract covers floors 13 through 16, 63,253 square feet.
No agency estimate either, and that's new. H+H used to put ranges right in its facade ad titles, as recently as July 2022. The published record on comparable H+H exterior work: Kings County Building P at $13M–$14.5M (2018), the Kings County T Building plus roof at $11M–$12M (2019), Jacobi Buildings 1 and 2 at $2.2M–$2.5M (2020), Elmhurst at $5M–$6M (2021), Lincoln's Local Law 11 facade repairs at $4.7M–$5.3M (2022). Both of H+H's 2026 facade solicitations — this one and Gotham Belvis — publish none. Size it yourself; we're not doing that math for you. When and why the practice lapsed is a fair question for the agency.
Then the screens that thin the room. M/WBE goal is 30 percent under Article 15-A on any bid of $500,000 or more, and "Bidders not complying with these terms will have their bids declared non-responsive." Say your number comes in at $6 million — $1.8 million of that has to go to certified M/WBE subs, lined up and papered, or your price never gets read. That 30 is set per contract, not by policy: the comparable Gotham Belvis facade job set 32 on the same threshold. And Article 15-A is state law, not the city Local Law 1 regime you know from city-agency work — H+H is a public benefit corporation. The PLA prices the job for everyone bidding, even though only the winner signs a Letter of Assent. Insurance has to sit with a NAIC-admitted carrier: "Non-admitted carriers will not be accepted." Flat, no waiver, and surplus-lines paper on exterior work isn't something you cure by Wednesday morning. Certified payroll runs through NYC eComply. Subs are encouraged to come to the pre-bid to get on the potential bidders list.
As of the morning of August 17, the posted plan-holder list showed at least 40 firms — a floor, not a census, since agencies do not always publish complete lists, and plan holders were never bidders. We wrote about that crowd Friday. Here's the structural piece: after Thursday, today's plan-holder list and the eligible-bidder list are two different sets. Hold every drawing, miss both meetings, and you're out. That gap is the story, not the count.
No addenda yet, which is exactly what you'd expect — the ad ran the 13th, the meetings are Wednesday and Thursday, questions close August 28 at 5 p.m., bids open September 24 at 11 a.m. So Addendum No. 1 should follow, and when it lands we're going straight to the sign-in sheets. Those pages will be the first real record of who's actually allowed to bid on a building the city's own facade filings have classified UNSAFE since January 2019.