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Restoring the city's historic buildings is painstaking and detailed work, but that has never deterred Charlie Merritt. In his 50-year engineering career, he has elped restore historic gems throughout the city. At the Cherokee Apartments, four buildings built by the Vanderbilt family in Manhattan, his Bayside, Queens-based firm,Merritt Engineering Consultants, recaptured the splendor of the ornate railings, even determining and restoring the original color - bright green - buried under 80 years of repaintings. His team has also helped preserve and restore other historically significant buildings, including Verizon's headquarters on West Street and the Manhattan House on the Upper East Side - 10 towers of 21 stories considered a modernist icon with their white-brick exteriors and progressive postwar design.
"When it's a landmark building like these, it requires that you restore it to as near its original condition as practical," said Mr....