NEW YORK — The precarious situation of a high-rise under construction in Manhattan was brought under control late Tuesday, allowing some previously evacuated buildings to reopen.
“After extensive monitoring, we’ve observed no further movement in the structure,” stated Ahmed Tigani, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Buildings, during a news briefing on Tuesday.
By the time night fell, several of the seven buildings initially evacuated for safety reasons had welcomed back their residents.
The situation began to unfold Tuesday morning when inspectors noticed columns bending at a 1970s-era structure undergoing conversion into luxury apartments. As a precaution, workers on-site and occupants of nearby structures—which include a school, diplomatic offices, and multiple hotels in bustling midtown—were evacuated after firefighters arrived at approximately 8 a.m. Mayor Zohran Mamdani labeled the incident as “an extremely serious situation.”
Upon further inspection, city teams found that the compromised columns showed no new signs of movement, allowing on-site contractors to proceed with urgent repair efforts. By Tuesday evening, workers were visibly reinforcing the damaged sections inside the sleek glass-and-steel skyscraper.
That work is expected to continue, impacting a part of Manhattan near the famed Grand Central train station that is a hub for metro area commuters and residents as well as tourists.
Fears of collapse prompted evacuation orders
The building, which is the former headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, is located just down the street from New York City icons like the Chrysler Building and the United Nations headquarters.
Leila Bozorg, one of Mamdani’s deputy mayors, said it was “encouraging” the building did not appear to be shifting as officials went up into and past the damaged floors on their way to the 37th floor – the top floor – of the building.
From the street below, a badly bent structural column could be seen through a large glass window on the 21st floor. The fire department, which also posted images of the column, said they found multiple cracks and sagging floors as well.
Asked earlier in the day if there was concern of a collapse, Fire Chief John Esposito said the way the steel-framed building is constructed, “it would not be a total collapse, it would be more of a localized collapse.”
Nearby buildings and streets remained evacuated for much of the day, including a school and the Israeli consulate just across the street. The former Pfizer building itself was empty at the time, other than for the construction workers.
Ramesh Yallappa, a tourist who was among those evacuated from a nearby hotel, said he initially feared it was a fire in the hotel when an immediate evacuation was ordered Tuesday morning.
“That moment, we were really really scared,” he said.
Developer says new addition led to damage
With more than 1,600 units, the developers say the project is the largest office-to-residential conversion in the city’s history. Gensler, the architectural firm leading the project, says on its website that it is transforming a pair of 1970s-era office buildings by adding more than a dozen stories and redesigning an adjoining tower.
Building department records show the project has been fined by the city for several safety violations, including glass and metal falling off the building, along with an incident where a worker fell off a ladder.
Spokespersons for Gensler and MetroLoft, the project developer, didn’t return messages seeking comment.
But in a statement to The New York Times, MetroLoft stressed that the building itself is not at risk of collapse and that no debris fell from the building.
Nathan Berman, founder of MetroLoft, told The Wall Street Journal that the added weight from widening the top 15 or so floors of the building likely caused the damage. The two columns that buckled may not have been properly reinforced, he told the newspaper.
“Why those particular two columns and nothing else? We don’t know,” Berman told the Journal. “We’re investigating that.”
He maintained the building’s integrity wasn’t compromised.
“Ninety-five percent of the building, the structure is sound and intact,” Berman told the Journal. “There is no way that this corner of a small extension all of a sudden topples this building.”
Experts say more extensive repairs likely needed
Emily Guglielmo, a structural engineer based in California, said the buckled columns are likely not repairable and will need to be removed and replaced.
“A lot of these things – cracking, deflections, sagging – those elements are probably not salvageable,” she said.
Replacing the columns will require rigorous analysis, and the repairs will be expensive, experts said.
The short-term solution is shoring up the structure and the floors, said Abi Aghayere, a professor of structural engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Shoring involves installing four-legged scaffolding to temporarily carry the load that the structure is supposed to carry until the columns can be replaced, Aghayere said.
Yi Bao, associate professor of civil engineering at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, said the building could be damaged beyond the buckled columns, which could have forced the loads to be redistributed to different parts of the building.
Ed Miller, an area resident, said he walks under the building’s scaffolding several times a day, but will find other routes home going forward.
“The building was pretty old,” said Miles Grant, who said he used to work at the building. “It definitely needed a lot of work to become ready for residential.”
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