Two steel columns buckled inside a 37-story Midtown Manhattan tower on July 7, caving in five floors and forcing a mass evacuation, and the incident is drawing fresh scrutiny to a pair of far taller buildings with documented structural problems of their own.
Construction workers were inside 235 East 42nd Street, the former Pfizer global headquarters near Grand Central Terminal, when the columns on the 21st floor gave way. Floors 21 through 26 sagged and caved under the stress. The New York City Fire Department arrived and confirmed the buckled columns. The Department of Buildings ordered everyone out, and the Washington Examiner reported that nine nearby buildings were also evacuated, including a school with roughly 400 children, diplomatic offices, and a hotel. Streets around the site were shut down.
The building is in the middle of what has been billed as New York City's largest office-to-residential conversion, a project to turn the old Pfizer complex into more than 1,600 apartments. The developer, MetroLoft, and its founder Nathan Berman have acknowledged that the added weight from widening the top 15 or so floors likely caused the damage. Berman called it a "freak accident." The city's Department of Buildings filed a complaint the next day, July 8, against the building's owner, 235 Fee Owner LLC, accusing it of carrying out construction that went beyond previously approved plans.
Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said the structure had not shown further signs of movement after the initial buckling. He described the city's protocols for dealing with any new shifting.
"If there is any movement or if we sense any movement, we have protocols in place to make sure we're quickly removing people outside the building to evaluate and reassess."
But independent engineers painted a grimmer picture. Ronald Hamburger, a structural engineer with five decades of experience, told the New York Post that the buckled columns were holding only about a third of the load they were designed for. The intact beams and columns around them were "highly stressed." His assessment was blunt.
"It poses a significant danger and could collapse."
Emily Guglielmo, a structural engineer and principal at the firm Martin/Martin, noted that catastrophic failures like this one usually stem from multiple overlapping causes, not a single mistake. The instability is believed to stem from the ongoing construction adding 11 floors to the existing building.
MetroLoft pushed back on the most alarming characterizations. The developer's statement insisted that "at no time was the building, or any portion of it, at risk of collapse." Berman described the damage as limited to a roughly 20-by-20-foot section on the building's northwest corner, affecting fewer than 30 of the planned 1,600-plus apartments. Fox News reported that the building had been stabilized with temporary shoring and that MetroLoft planned to keep the project on track for a 2027 completion.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani called it an "extremely serious situation." The building already had 22 violations dating back to 2020, and the New York Post reported it received seven more between July and December 2025, resulting in more than $32,000 in fines. In 2025, the site owner and MetroLoft were sued over unsafe work conditions after a worker fell from a collapsed wooden platform.
New York's pattern of building violations piling up before disaster strikes is not new. And the 42nd Street emergency has revived pointed questions about two other Manhattan high-rises with well-documented structural troubles: 432 Park Avenue and 161 Maiden Lane.
At 96 stories and 1,396 feet, 432 Park Avenue is one of the "supertall" residential towers lining Billionaires' Row. It opened in 2015. Residents started complaining almost immediately, about swaying, creaking noises, and cracks. Independent building engineers eventually found thousands of severe cracks throughout the structure, including a 10-inch-deep crack in the building's core.
The condo board sued the developers, CIM Group and Macklowe Properties, in 2021. A follow-up lawsuit filed in 2025 against the sponsor entity, 56th & Park (NY) Owner, LLC, alleged "deliberate and far-reaching fraud", claiming the developers failed to disclose approximately 1,900 construction and design defects to condo buyers. Those defects, the suit alleged, included corrosion of steel reinforcement in concrete columns caused by repeated flooding, malfunctioning elevators, and disruptive noise and vibrations.
City records show 135 open complaints, 145 regular building code violations, and 111 fines and penalties against the building. The Department of Buildings fined 432 Park Avenue for safety problems including loose or falling concrete on exterior walls and for not putting up proper sidewalk barriers during repairs.
Structural engineer Steve Bongiorno, who was not involved with the original project, warned in an October 2025 New York Times article about what could happen if the problems went unaddressed. He said the building could eventually require evacuation.
"Chunks of concrete will fall off, and windows will start loosening up. There's no sidewalk shed that's going to protect you from chunks of concrete popping off a 1,400-foot building."
A $160 million facade repair project reportedly began in July 2026 and is expected to take up to four years. Celebrity residents Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez lived in a $15.3 million condo there in 2018 before moving out a year later, citing lack of space. Whether they encountered any structural issues during their stay is unknown.
Jami Schlicher, a spokesperson for the defendants, disputed the condo board's claims in a statement to the Daily Mail.
"Claims of 432 Park's facade deterioration are baseless and contradicted by the Board's own engineers, who have certified the facade as SWARMP (Safe With a Repair and Maintenance Program). Importantly, Sponsor, its design team, the contractors, and each of their respective experts disagree with the Board's meritless allegations and reaffirm that the building is safe."
The Department of Buildings has repeatedly said 432 Park Avenue meets safety standards with no immediate risk of collapse. It has not issued major "unsafe" structural violations or vacate orders for the tower. But 135 open complaints and a $160 million repair bill tell their own story.
In lower Manhattan's Financial District, a 60-story residential tower at 161 Maiden Lane, also known as One Seaport, has been sitting unfinished and unoccupied since construction halted in 2021. The building has a roughly three-inch lean. Locals call it the "Leaning Tower of New York."
The trouble traces back to a foundation decision. Developer Fortis Property Group chose soil improvement methods instead of traditional concrete piles, allegedly saving approximately $6 million. The building's contractor, Pizzarotti LLC, filed a lawsuit in 2019 alleging the lean was caused by the developer's cost-cutting choice.
Elisabeth Malsch, a structural engineer at the firm Thornton Tomasetti hired by Pizzarotti as an independent expert, filed a 2019 court affidavit with a stark warning. She said there was not enough information to guarantee the building would remain safe if work continued, and that pressing ahead without a major redesign risked "breaking windows and components falling to the street" from up to 58 stories above ground, causing "grave injury to persons and property." She deemed the worst-case scenario, the tower toppling and crushing nearby buildings, highly unlikely, but her core conclusion stood: the building could not safely be finished as designed.
Fortis called the allegations "patently false from start to finish and nothing more than simple defamation" and filed counter-claims against Pizzarotti. The lawsuit was still dragging on as of 2026. The Department of Buildings has not approved the tower for occupancy but has said it is structurally stable for now, mandating constant monitoring and regular engineering reports.
Manhattan's luxury real estate market is already under pressure from the new pied-à-terre tax, which has cooled demand at the high end. A 60-story building that cannot be occupied adds nothing to the city's housing stock and plenty to its list of liabilities.
The July 7 emergency at 235 East 42nd Street was not an isolated event. In 2023, the entire side of a seven-story apartment building in the Bronx collapsed after a load-bearing pier was unsafely removed during construction. More recently, the basement wall of a 17-story office building on Manhattan's 59th Street partially collapsed, producing large cracks in the foundation wall.
The Department of Buildings maintains a list of "structurally compromised" buildings across the city. But it has not revealed which buildings are currently on it. When the Daily Mail requested the list, DOB officials said they would not be able to respond before October 2026, more than three months after the 42nd Street collapse.
That delay is worth sitting with. A building buckles near Grand Central Terminal, floors cave in, nine surrounding buildings are evacuated including a school full of children, and the agency responsible for structural safety says it needs until fall to tell the public which other buildings it considers compromised. AP News reported that experts largely agreed the 42nd Street incident should not undermine the broader concept of office-to-residential conversions as a housing solution. But the question is not whether adaptive reuse can work. The question is whether the city's oversight is keeping pace with the ambition.
Mayor Mamdani's broader housing agenda, including new taxes on luxury second homes and proposals to hand buildings over to tenants, depends on a city government that can credibly manage its building stock. Buckled columns, secret lists, and months-long delays in basic transparency do not inspire that confidence.
New Yorkers deserve to know whether the buildings above their heads are safe. Right now, the city is asking them to trust the same agency that can't return a phone call until October.
