Accommodations at the Sheffield57

The owner of the Sheffield57, a West 57th Street building undergoing a contentious condo conversion and renovation, has become very, well, accommodating.

The building’s management sent a memo to the remaining tenants Thursday indicating they would need to vacate their apartments for the night because of a city-ordered asbestos clean-up. Now, however, a building spokesman told The Observer that the original estimate for how long the clean-up would take had been revised downward from 36 hours to “three or four.”

“During the cleaning and testing period, on days when the corridor of a particular floor is to be cleaned and tested (expected to be thirty-six (36) hours per floor), the NYCDEP is requiring that no one will have access to the hallway corridor,” the memo distributed on Thursday read.

A spokesman for the principal owner, Kent Swig, said on Friday that the clean-up “may only take three or four hours.” But, if tenants did have to sleep elsewhere, they could, on request, be put up in a hotel.

The city Department of Environmental Protection, which ordered the building’s management to halt work and undertake the clean-up after determining last week that the ceiling coating contained asbestos, had never thought that the clean-up would require the relocation of tenants, spokesman Ian Michaels said.

“We believe that the abatement work could be done in several hours and during that time, the tenants would not be able to use the hallway,” he said.