New York City Contractor Cracks the Toughest City Jobs

Urban Foundation/Engineering’s proprietary methodology invented to lift the historic Palace Theater into a high-rise location in Manhattan in 2022 won the New York City firm’s President Tony Mazzo recognition as an ENR Newsmaker. But with $91.7-million in 2023 regional revenue, the company also ranks at No. 11 on the 2024 ENR New York Top Specialty Contractors list—a 21.8% increase from the total it reported on last year’s ranking.

Urban Foundation/Engineering also ranked at No. 362 on the latest ENR national Top 600 Specialty Contractors list, reporting $75.3 million in 2022 revenue, with an improvement expected when the ranking based on 2023 revenue publishes in the magazine’s Oct. 28 issue.

For these reasons and more, ENR New York has named Urban Foundation/Engineering LLC, based in East Elmhurst, N.Y., as its 2024 Specialty Contractor of the Year. ENR Deputy Editor Jeff Rubenstone interviewed Mazzo, who has been firm president for more than 25 years, about its successful work and regional market. This Q&A has been edited and condensed.

Q&A

Recently Urban Engineering has seen an uptick in work. Is this a general trend in the New York-area market or are there other reasons?

In the post-pandemic years, we’ve waited for the industry to come back, and lots of work has resurfaced. Revenue has gone up because jobs are larger, [with] larger contracts. It’s all timing. We are doing some things that we’ve never done before, and some things that we have done before that we specialize in.

We are experienced in moving structures, and we’re doing some of that, but a lot of [what] we’re currently doing is just bigger foundation work. Our stock-in-trade is excavation, supportive excavation and foundations, concrete, deep-drilled elements, caissons, piles and the like. But we are doing new stuff as well [such as] deep soil mixing.

We’ve done deep secant walls [in order to] excavate below the water. But now we’re doing deep soil mixing to create a grouted plug below a deep excavation. We are currently waiting to start three pump stations in Queens for the [New York City Dept. of Environmental Protection]—some of which will be drilling deep plugs as far as 50 ft deep to excavate and install and build 40-ft-deep pumphouses.

So we’re moving a little more in that direction. But we are also still moving buildings. We are in preliminary talks to move a building in Yonkers, N.Y. It’s a little premature to expand on it now.

Is that based on past work, like lifting the Palace Theater and moving buildings in Manhattan?

Actually, the insurance companies almost insist on it, because there are only two that want to insure first-time comers to try things they have never been done before. So, we kind of fell into that [type of work] a little bit. It started in 1998, when we moved the Empire Theater 170 ft down 42nd St. This new building [in Yonkers] is [larger] but almost the same weight, and we’re going to have to also move it 170 ft on land and have to cut it in half because there’s not enough room where it has to be moved to fit the entire building on the adjacent site.

So it’s a little bit of creativity. This is the stuff that we as professional engineers long for. I mean, the day-to-day stuff is wonderful, it pays the bills and it’s necessary since it allows the city to grow. But we look for things as engineers that actually tax our expertise, right?

I try to instill this into my younger engineers—to inspire them to see how we can come up with a better mousetrap. Or how we could do the job safer or more economically or just because the need is there and no one has figured it out yet. That’s what Urban’s reputation has been in the private sector. We’re not that visible in the public sector, but we’re getting there.

Given your expertise, are you concerned about transmitting knowledge and know-how to the next generation more broadly?

My predecessors instilled in me the need to do the best I can to raise the bar for our industry and for our trade as well as for the science of engineering in general. I was raised that way, and now I [want others] to follow in my footsteps, and they and I think you need to lead by example.

I always try to keep good relationships with our clients, not to take anything for granted and not just go along with the lines on the paper.

A mentor once told me, “This is just somebody else’s idea, Tony, these are just lines on the paper.” When you look at it that way, I’m now hoping to see if [the next generation] can come up with a better way to do something.

Don’t be satisfied with someone else’s idea, I tell younger workers. Everyone has ideas, and because as you develop in this industry, you’re going to find that with all the experience gained in working in this big laboratory we know as the field, with its diverse jobs, you’re going to have a different take on how things should be done.

I want to instill confidence in younger employees to deviate from the norms and from the current state of construction to show the industry new techniques and how new challenges can be met.