By Maria Tsvetkova and Joseph Ax
NEW YORK, July 8 (Reuters) – A Midtown Manhattan high-rise being converted into 1,600 apartments has been stabilized after buckling support columns triggered evacuations and fears of a collapse, but officials and engineers were still trying on Wednesday to determine what went wrong.
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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that emergency crews had installed temporary shoring and steel beams from the 18th to the 23rd floors and that there had been no further movement of the structure since Tuesday morning, when two columns buckled and several floors began to sag.
The 37-story building on East 42nd Street, once Pfizer’s corporate headquarters, is situated about a block from the United Nations. It was evacuated along with neighboring properties after bricks fell from the structure and responders discovered damage on the 21st and 22nd floors.
“There has been no additional movement of the structure since yesterday morning,” the mayor told reporters.
Neighboring buildings, including a school, had been evacuated, and busy 42nd Street was closed down. Some buildings have since reopened, but four remain evacuated and a ground-floor restaurant on a fifth is still shuttered, Mamdani said.
Eva Notwicz, 47, who lives across the street, had been happy to see the office tower being converted into much-needed housing. But watching the addition of several floors atop the building, right above where the columns eventually buckled on Tuesday, had made her nervous.
“It felt like it’s hanging there,” she said. “But you know, you trust the builders.”
She and her son were ordered out of her apartment on Tuesday morning, with time only to grab her phone and the dog, but were allowed back in by nighttime.
“I’m sure they’re gonna make it super safe now,” she said.
On Wednesday, bystanders took photos from the street, while office workers at the News Building across the street – the former home of the Daily News – said they were told to return to their workplace.
CAUSE UNCLEAR
One of the developers behind the project told the New York Times that the building was never in danger of collapsing and described the buckling columns as a run-of-the-mill problem.
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“This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” Nathan Berman, the managing principal and founder of developer MetroLoft, told the newspaper. He said the columns were likely not reinforced properly and thus could not bear the weight of the addition above.
Experts agreed that the risk of collapse was minimal, but that city inspectors would have to determine the exact cause of the buckling columns before allowing construction to proceed. There were a number of possible explanations, experts said.
“Typically, it’s not just one mistake,” said Michael Chajes, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Delaware.
Converting an existing building carries more complications than building a brand-new structure, said Magued Iskander, chair of the civil and urban engineering department at New York University’s Tandon School of Engineering.
“There are more unknowns,” he said. “It is easier to design from a blank sheet of paper.”
The building, which served for decades as Pfizer’s corporate headquarters, is being converted into a 1,600-unit apartment complex due for completion in 2027, according to the architectural firm Gensler’s website.
Mamdani said Wednesday he remained supportive of converting office space into residences to help address the city’s housing affordability crisis. The city’s building department will conduct a “rigorous assessment” to ensure that the high-rise is safe and compliant with all codes before any further construction work can proceed, he added.
(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Jesse Mesner-Hage, Mark Porter and Howard Goller)
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