The former Pfizer HQ at 42nd & 2nd, which was being converted luxury apartments & being made taller by adding floors has been evacuated, along with nine other buildings in the collapse zone (First to Third & 40th to 45th) due to support columns buckling on 21st & 22nd floors
ABC7 story
CBS2 story
NBC4 story
Better start slinging those webs.
I’m wondering what caused the support column to buckle. Was part of the support removed?
It seems they were adding new floors atop an existing building. And it’s now 37 stories tall with failures on the 21st through 26th floors.
But I can’t find a good reference to how tall the building was before the modifications began. Anyone?
One thing that’s confusing the search is that there are actually two buildings in play here, one that was 10 stories and one that was 33 stories.
It looks like part of the work is that the 10 story building was being raised to 29 stories.
The older building at 219 East 42nd Street, completed in 1905, was originally a 10-story building. The building at 235 East 42nd Street, designed by Emery Roth & Sons in the International Style, was constructed in 1960 and has 33 stories.
Both buildings have been undergoing a conversion to residential use since 2024; the project includes constructing 1,600 apartments and expanding 219 East 42nd Street to 29 stories.
I’m not confident from the search which building is buckling.
I’m not a civil or structural engineer. But I’m thinking anyone that touched this project or put signature on it is eyeballing their professional liability coverage and wishing they’d declined this project.
These buildings may be constructive total losses even if they can be repaired. You want to buy into the building that started falling down already? And may well have been overloaded beyond anything but temporary repairs until the next thing fails?
We have a slightly similar failed construction project here in SoFL. New construction, but the original developer ran out of money, stalled, and went bankrupt. The project has restarted several times with several new owners, each going bankrupt in turn. One suspects some criminal activity along the way.
Meanwhile everyone is suing everyone else, and the half-built building has been open to the elements for a decade. Nobody thinks it can be safely completed, and even if somebody did complete it nobody with a clue would want to buy into it and the monster liability tarball attached to it.
So there it sits. Effectively a constructive total loss.
So you’re saying there’s already a waiting list?
Your description makes me think of the big-ass NK pyramid.
Pfizer HQ, you say? I guess this is the sort of thing that happens when you think disclaimers are needed if things stay erect for more than four hours.
If I were in the building and saw a column buckled like that I wouldn’t stop to take a picture, I’d set a record for the 21 floor stair descent…
It’s local reputation is similar although it’s much smaller. I too was reminded of the Ryugyong as I was writing.
No money to finish it and no money to tear it down & start over. I expect that at some point the taxpayers will pay to remove the eyesore so some well-connected developer can have a freshly cleared desirable site for free.
(rimshot)
I can’t be the only person who thought of the Surfside disaster, and am thankful they caught it now and not after people moved in. My first thought was actually that the really skinny tower that’s nearly 1,000 feet tall started to uncontrollably buckle.
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Your post made me think of THIS averted disaster, when a man who was inspecting an Interstate bridge over the Mississippi River near Memphis saw a crack that was dangerous enough, he called 911 to get the road closed off before he even notified his supervisors.
Yeah, whomever said “Yeah, go ahead with the plan to add more floors to this structure” has some 'splainin to do.
And I’ll likewise bet that we’re going to hear a lot of “that wasn’t me; it was my underling who approved this”.
Another NYC building failure was discussed here a couple years ago. An old building had been converted to a multi-story parking structure. Using valets who would pack the cars in like sardines. Of course those floors were never designed to support the weight of wall to wall modern cars.
The whole building didn’t come down, but one floor collapsed onto the next one down, and a lot of cars got wrecked.
See
No! No! No! You’re all wrong! This is just a minor blip! As the project developer states:
The structural concerns that led New York City officials to shut down a Midtown Manhattan high-rise and evacuate surrounding buildings are “very small,” said Nathan Berman, the chief executive officer of Metro Loft, which is leading the project to convert the historic Pfizer building into apartments…
“People are smart enough to understand that this is something that’s happening during construction,” he said in an interview. “Construction mishaps happen regularly. Those are risks of construction, ground up or conversion.”…
“It was maybe a lot of caution but that’s a good thing,” Berman said, adding that Metro Loft is “very appreciative of the city acting as quickly as they have and being as proactive as they were. If we had a real problem at the building, this would have been a very important step, and they wisely took it.”…
The project will likely experience a few weeks delay, he said. “It’s a localized problem that may delay my delivery of those particular section of the floors,” he said. “It’s less than 1%, a fraction of the building. It’s frankly not a major issue for us at all.”
Boy does that CEO sound like the guy in @Monty’s wiki cite upthread. Who ended up in prison and broke after they seized all his personal assets to pay the victims & families. Shame that won’t happen here. Then again, that guy’s construction hubris killed hundreds. This guy’s score is zero … so far.
OK, before, I wouldn’t have wanted to live in that building. But now, after reading that, I find myself having a change of heart.
Now, I don’t want to ever be within a block of any building that guy has ever been involved with.