Columns buckle in Manhattan high-rise conversion, forcing evacuations near Grand Central

What happened

On Tuesday morning, bricks fell from the 21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters at 42nd Street, prompting a call to the New York Fire Department just before 8 a.m. Responders found two load-bearing columns had buckled on the 21st and 22nd floors, and floors between the 21st and 26th stories were sagging. The building, a steel-frame structure built in the 1960s, is being converted into more than 1,600 luxury apartments in what architects describe as the largest office-to-residential conversion in city history.

Two load-bearing columns have deformed, in addition to multiple cracks and sagging floors. The building remains unstable. Since our arrival on site, we have observed new movements in one of the weakened columns.

Response and evacuations

Mayor Zohran Mamdani described the situation as "extremely serious" at an afternoon press conference, while confirming no injuries and that all construction workers had been accounted for. Nearby hotels, businesses, apartments, and a school with nearly 400 children were evacuated as a precaution. Police cordoned off streets around the site, and about 130 firefighters and emergency medical personnel deployed drones and sensors capable of detecting shifts as small as a centimeter.

The beams had bent. We all had to get out fast.

Structural concerns

Fire Department Chief John Esposito said the steel-frame construction meant a total collapse was not expected, but a localized collapse remained a concern. "That remains our concern, that it's moved," he said. A New York Times review of images from inside the building found that several floors had been added atop the columns that failed. Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute, said that if the structure had been overloaded, movement would typically happen very quickly rather than gradually, and that a progressive collapse, while unlikely, could not be ruled out.

Generally when a column buckles, it's a sudden failure. The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation.

Stabilization and investigation

By early evening, measurements showed the building had stopped moving, and city officials declared the situation "stable and safe," allowing contractors to begin installing temporary supports. A spokesperson declined to explicitly rule out the risk of a partial collapse. The developer, Metroloft, attributed the failure to a "typical construction defect" in the original 1960s structure and said the entire building was not at risk of collapse. Emergency repairs are expected to take several days, and the city's Department of Buildings has structural engineers on site investigating the cause.