Twenty-one stories above a Midtown Manhattan street on Tuesday morning, construction workers were busy converting an office building into a residential complex when it began falling apart.
“The beams started bending,” said Cliff Johnsen, the business agent for the Local 638 steamfitters union, which had workers on site. Several floors were sagging.
The building seemed to be crumbling fast, he said.
The workers evacuated the tower, at 235 East 42nd Street, near Grand Central Terminal and the United Nations, and a supervisor called 911, prompting a hurried emergency response. Fearing a partial collapse, officials evacuated nearby buildings and blocked off several nearby streets to pedestrians and vehicular traffic.
Officials said there were no injuries, but they had seen severe structural damage between the 21st and 26th floors. As a precaution, the city established a “frozen zone” stretching several blocks, disrupting businesses, stranding tourists and snarling traffic most of the day.
Late Tuesday, Ahmed Tigani, the Department of Buildings commissioner, said the building was stable, though the situation in the neighborhood would remain tense “for the next couple of days.” Officials slowly began allowing buildings in the area that had been evacuated to reopen, though a handful still remained off-limits early Wednesday.
“I can say right now the building is stable,” Mr. Tigani said. “We feel confident in the emergency plan we have now.”
The episode stalled a project that had come to symbolize the city’s ambitious effort to repurpose Midtown’s empty office buildings to address the city’s housing shortage. Developers called the project the largest office-to-residential conversion in city history; it had been set for completion next year.
The dramatic episode, though, clouded the project’s future, as inspectors raced to figure out what exactly went wrong, how it could be fixed and the full extent of the problems.
Nathan Berman, the managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, one of the two firms behind the conversion, said he expected a delay of only a few weeks. He said the problems amounted to a “typical construction mishap.” In response, a spokesman for the Buildings Department said, “The work to shore up the unstable building is ongoing as is our investigation into the cause of the incident.”
At a news conference in the early afternoon, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that building inspectors using drones to survey the 37-story building spotted two columns that had buckled, several cracks and sagging floors. The building continued to shift after the authorities arrived, he said.
The mayor urged people to avoid the area until the authorities deemed it safe.
MetroLoft, in a statement, thanked city officials for their quick response and described the damage as limited to a small area of the building.
Mr. Berman said the floors affected only sagged by a few inches.
“This is well engineered, well thought through and well executed, with the exception of those two columns that could not take the load,” he said.
The Fire Department shared photos from the building on social media that showed missing paneling on the building facade and a vertical beam bent like an elbow. Fire officials said there was no risk of a full building collapse because of its steel-frame construction.
The Fire Department said it responded to a call at around 8 a.m. on Monday from someone reporting bricks falling off the building. John Esposito, the chief of department, said inspectors later discovered that the building’s steel support beams on the 21st floor had begun to bend and deflect from the weight of the upper floors.
Mr. Tigani explained that emergency beams and columns called “struts” would take the weight off the compromised beams and prevent additional damage. By evening, contractors began installing emergency support beams to stabilize the structure.
The building, constructed in 1960, is one of two that previously made up the headquarters of Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company by revenue, before the company moved west to the other side of Manhattan in the Hudson Yards neighborhood.
In 2024, construction began to convert the offices into an apartment building with more than 1,600 units, a rooftop pool, retail shops and other amenities spanning 100,000 square feet. The developers got a $720 million loan from Madison Realty Capital, which at the time was the largest construction loan in the city for an office conversion, Mr. Berman said.
Tuesday was not the first time inspectors had been called to the site over falling objects. Last July, the Buildings Department fined the developer $5,000 after a piece of window glass fell from the eighth floor onto a sidewalk shed. Officials fined company $10,000 in August, after a metal pane fell from the 33rd floor onto the sidewalk below. Both times, inspectors issued temporary stop work orders.
Then in December, the developer was fined another $10,000 for failing to file a timely injury report after a worker fell six feet from a ladder while dismantling a crane. A city inspector said that the ladder was not fully open and on a level surface, which contributed to the fall.
Investigators did not find evidence to substantiate other complaints of unsafe work conditions. One such complaint stated that a large item had fallen and broken through five floors, narrowly missing a worker. All the complaints were listed as resolved in the agency’s online database.
Until Tuesday, the building had 13 active violations from 2025, mostly for failing to file elevator inspection and testing reports, with penalties totaling $39,000.
A 311 complaint filed against the project on Tuesday accused the developers of conducting excavation that was beyond or contrary to construction plans that had been approved, according to the agency’s online portal. Specifics of the complaint were not yet available, but the Buildings Department said it was investigating.
Mr. Johnsen, the union official, said the incident was highly unusual, and he claimed that the builders had not used enough steel to support the weight of the additional floors. His claim could not be verified.
“That’s not something you see,” he said, noting the union’s role in building Hudson Yards, the World Trade Center, Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden and Barclays Center.
Abi Aghayere, a professor of structural engineering at Drexel University, likened office-to-residential renovations to “structural gymnastics.” During those intermediate stages, a lot of work would be happening in the building that could give rise to potential problems.
For example, beams that support columns that bear vertical loads might be moved. Those types of problems could emerge because of a faulty design or because of an error by the construction workers.
“There’s going to be a lot of cutting of holes and slabs and all that to make room for all the HVAC and the plumbing for each individual residential unit,” he said.
He said photos of the buckling seemed to show that at least one affected column was old, and potentially corroded or rotted.
He said investigators should “strip” the building — look under any superficial exterior surface, like paint, to see what’s actually going on in the “skeleton.” That would help determine both how to stabilize the building temporarily and whether it was viable to continue with the project at all.
“No one knows what stage the structure is in right now,” he said.
Jamison Morse, principal at PVEDI Engineering, said what happens next would be determined by what inspectors discover.
“Where did the error lie? Were there bad assumptions? Bad information given to the engineer? Or were the contractors doing something that the engineer didn’t recommend and were they cowboying it?” he said.
He said it was likely that the developers would try to fix the problem and move on. But he said it was also possible that the solution would be so expensive that it would derail the project entirely.
“The entire structural engineering community is watching this one pretty closely,” he said.
Evacuations from the frozen zone disrupted operations for at least one foreign consulate, a cable news station and several hotels.
Kevin Reardon, the executive chef at the Westin New York Grand Central, fielded calls from his staff members as he stood along Third Avenue with a group of Westin hotel employees who had been evacuated.
“I don’t think you’re coming in today,” he told one caller.
The workers and their guests had been made to leave their belongings behind, he said, complicating guests’ stays and workers’ commutes home. “People have cars inside so they can’t get home,” he said.
On East 43rd Street, Christy Walls huddled over a pizza with her two children and college roommate, backpacks stacked on the Manhattan ground. They were supposed to check in for a stay at the Hampton Inn Manhattan Grand Central, but the hotel was evacuated and blocked off by street barricades.
“We’re standing on the street with security and police,” her friend, Emily Oehler, argued on the phone with Hilton. “I don’t want you to cancel it because I need a room.”
Ms. Walls, here for a two-night stay from West Virginia to see “The Outsiders” on Broadway, said they were trying to get their reservation switched to another Hampton Inn. One hotel had already turned them down.
“We just need a place to stay,” Ms. Walls said.
Caitlyn Freeman, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Hurubie Meko, Ryley Ober and Wesley Parnell contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
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