The Fifth-Floor Office Illusion

No one is on the fifth floor. More precisely, no one has been for the past two months.

I’m a building manager. For sixteen years, I’ve worked in this thirty-two-story building in Lower Manhattan. Every morning at six, I make my way up from the lowest floor to the highest, checking on each floor’s condition. Twelve floors have contracted tenants. Sixteen are empty. But having a contract doesn’t mean having people.

The first tenant assigned to the fifth floor was a place called Cheongram Asset Management. They divided the office with partitions and covered the walls with white boards. At one point, there were more than twenty employees. In the conference room, English and Korean mixed from morning. I knew some of the faces. A tall woman who always carried two coffees. A bearded man who always greeted me in the elevator. During months with late nights, the fifth floor alone would glow after the rest of the building went dark.

The disappearance of those people was silent.

There was never a moving truck. Day by day, more empty desks accumulated. At first, one or two desks were cleared away. Then one day only the conference room remained. Now even that is empty. By the window is a single potted plant someone left behind. The soil is completely dried out, but the stem still stands. At first I thought about throwing it away too. Then I just left it. I started watering it.

I still maintain the fifth-floor cleaning. Because the lease is still active. The management office told me rent comes in every month. Over $20,000 monthly is transferred for 1,200 square feet that no one uses. I find that fact strange as I push the vacuum. Money comes and goes, but there are no people.

In one corner of the whiteboard, numbers that weren’t erased remain. Q4 targets. Profit margins. Dollar signs. Someone must have tried to erase them dozens of times—faint marker traces still visible. At first, I thought about erasing them too. Then I just left them. The things that remained seemed to say something. Whether they were achieved or not, I couldn’t tell.

There are badges. Five of them. Employee ID badges still lying in a desk drawer. Names printed on them. Photos too. I looked at those photos. The faces in the ID pictures were uniformly expressionless and young. Where are the owners of these badges now? Did they move to another company? Another city? Are they sitting at home with a laptop open?

I once read an article saying Manhattan office vacancy exceeded 18 percent. The highest since the pandemic, it said. But that statistic doesn’t include the fifth floor I’m cleaning. Because the lease is still active. Statistically, this floor is in use. Cheongram Asset Management is recorded as occupying it. Even though it’s actually empty.

So perhaps there’s a story vacancy statistics don’t tell. Floors that are alive in contracts but lifeless in reality. Empty spaces that numbers can’t capture. There’s a separate count that only a manager knows.

Today, for the first time, I flipped over one of the badges. On the back, a small extension number written in tiny letters. Would it connect, this number? It was strange that I thought of a phone. I tried to remember if there was a phone on the fifth floor. There was. It’s still plugged in. A black landline. I had no intention of dialing that number, and I didn’t.

Today too, I cleaned the empty floor. The vacuum hummed. I traced vacuum lines across dust-free floors and turned to leave. Just before the elevator doors closed, I looked back once more. The numbers on the whiteboard caught the window light, glimmering faintly.

The potted plant stood with its stem upright.

The five badges will be in that drawer tomorrow too.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.