A Midtown Manhattan office tower under conversion into luxury apartments has been evacuated along with several surrounding buildings after two structural columns buckled Tuesday morning, with officials warning the structure remains unstable hours later.
The Fire Department of New York received a call around 8 a.m. reporting bricks falling from the building at 235 East 42nd Street, a former Pfizer headquarters located between Grand Central Terminal and the United Nations, roughly a block from the Chrysler Building. Responding officers were told that construction workers on the 21st floor had watched the columns begin to give way, and engineers later confirmed buckling on the 21st and 22nd floors, with steel box beams bending and deflecting under the load and sagging extending as high as the 26th floor.
New York City Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said the site consists of two connected structures: a 37-floor tower and a shorter 22-floor section that was in the process of having 11 additional floors built on top of it.
"They were adding 11 floors above the 22 floors," Tigani said.
Fire Department Chief of Department John Esposito said crews established a frozen zone and a collapse zone around the site and are working with the city's Buildings Department and the project's engineer to secure the area. He said the building has kept shifting since fire crews arrived, and that its steel-frame construction makes a total collapse unlikely.
"It would not be a total collapse; it would be more of a localized collapse," Esposito said.
New York City Fire Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore said an engineering assessment led officials to their current conclusion.
"The building was determined to be unstable," Bonsignore said.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said nine buildings were evacuated in total, including a school with roughly 400 students, and that all construction workers on site had been accounted for with no injuries reported. Crews have opted to monitor the tower using drones rather than send personnel inside, officials said.
Streets between 40th and 45th streets, from First to Third avenues, were closed to pedestrian and vehicle traffic while the response continued.
The building is at the center of what has been described as the largest office-to-residential conversion in New York City's history, led by architecture firm Gensler, with plans for more than 1,600 units spread across the two sections.
