NEW YORK (AP) — Workers began making emergency repairs to stabilize a Manhattan high-rise Tuesday evening after buckled columns and sagging floors forced evacuations in and around the midtown construction site.
The scene unfolded throughout the day after the precarious conditions were spotted in the morning at the 1970s-era building, which is being converted into luxury apartments. Construction workers at the site and people in nearby buildings — including a school, diplomatic offices and several hotels — in the busy corridor of midtown were rushed out after firefighters were called there around 8 a.m.
By early afternoon, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the building remained unstable and called it “an extremely serious situation.”
City officials going floor-by-floor later found no additional movement of the damaged columns, giving on-site contractors the greenlight to move forward with emergency repairs, his office said. By Tuesday evening, workers could be seen shoring up the damage inside the gleaming glass-and-steel high rise.
The temporary measures are meant to stabilize the building and are expected to stretch into the coming days, 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.
Fire and building officials, meanwhile, said they were going building-by-building in the surrounding area to determine whether street closures or evacuation orders could be lifted. By late Tuesday, some area residents were told it was safe to return, according to Mamdani’s office.
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.”
This story has been updated to correct that city officials revised the building’s height to 37 stories, not 38.
Izaguirre reported from Lindenhurst, New York. Associated Press reporters David R. Martin in New York and Jessica Hill in Las Vegas contributed to this story.