Paul Santo and Lou Milito are giving a whirlwind tour of Coordinated Metals Inc.’s 36,000-sq-ft shop while workers fold, punch, notch, etch or otherwise manipulate materials to create ornamental metal for some of New York City’s biggest projects. There are four fabricating crews on the floor. A vast array of multiple stock sheets are stored in back: bronze, stainless steel, aluminum. The pair show off their prize CNC milling machine that can handle material more than 20 ft long, and which automatically keeps its blades cold so that they stay sharp. They explain the importance of knowing exact tensile strength so that metal doesn’t “banana,” i.e. bend from being worked incorrectly. And when it comes to the finished products, says shop foreman Milito: “We don’t trust adhesives—it’s all fastened.”
If the visit to CMI’s Carlstadt, N.J., shop and office seems like a master class in metalwork, then vice president Paul Santo—who runs the company with president Frank Grippi and chief financial officer Scott Eisenberger—is its professor. Santo worked his way up from CMI’s shop floor starting in 1985, and even now he walks the floor every night to make sure everything’s tidy and in place. CMI has come a long way from its 1974 beginning as a vendor working on small partition storefronts to helping design “flagship jobs” around NYC, as Emad Lotfalla of client Related Cos. put it.