New York City investigators and Manhattan prosecutors have opened a preliminary criminal inquiry into what caused columns inside a Midtown building to buckle this week, according to a city official and a person with knowledge of the matter.
The inquiry, by the New York City Department of Investigation and the Manhattan district attorney’s office, was in its earliest stages on Friday, and its focus and targets were not immediately clear, in part because workers were still stabilizing the 37-story high-rise.
The building, at 235 East 42nd Street, was being converted from offices to apartments when workers on Tuesday noticed cracks in the concrete floors and bent columns on the 21st floor, prompting evacuations and an emergency response.
The criminal inquiry is likely to be complex and labor intensive. The construction project at the site, the former headquarters of the drugmaker Pfizer, was set to be the largest residential conversion in the United States, and such projects can involve dozens of companies, subcontractors and developers with different roles and obligations.
Piecing together what happened and why — and whether anyone was criminally responsible — can take months or years, and it is possible the inquiry could be closed without any charges being brought.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Investigation confirmed that the agency was examining the situation on East 42nd Street. A spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said she had no comment.
Both agencies have units that specialize in such inquiries and frequently conduct them together.
The project on East 42nd Street called for transforming the offices into a 37-story apartment building, and it was being developed by MetroLoft along with David Werner Real Estate. It involved expanding the building both vertically and horizontally, according to the contractor’s website, with additional stories added on top of the original floors, and would add 1,600 residential units to the city’s housing stock once finished.
Asked about the criminal investigation on Friday afternoon, Nathan Berman, the managing principal at MetroLoft, declined to comment. David Werner could not be reached for comment.
There was no indication on Friday that MetroLoft, David Werner Real Estate or any of the project’s numerous contractors and subcontractors were targets of the preliminary investigation.
The evacuation of the building on Tuesday caused the shutdown of surrounding city blocks, clearing offices, apartments and hotels that might have been affected if the building had collapsed. By late Tuesday night, the New York City Department of Buildings said the high rise had been stabilized with additional steel brought in to shore up the floors.
In the following days, competing narratives emerged. Mr. Berman of MetroLoft sought to characterize the incident as nothing unusual in the world of construction, while union workers and city officials raised concerns about how such glaring issues, such as the bent columns, were missed until the point of near collapse.
In an interview this week, Mr. Berman called the situation “a typical construction mishap.” He added that such things happen “unfortunately far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people — God forbid — falling off buildings, windows falling out.”
A private firm that conducted inspections on the building site, Domani Inspection Services, had been repeatedly cited for missing problems on other projects, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
Although it remained unclear what led to the columns buckling, Mr. Berman has been communicating with investors to reassure them that the project would be completed in 2027, on schedule, with relatively minor delays, according to two people familiar with the talks. The people spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive conversations.
The project, near Grand Central Terminal, is part of what has become a growing number of conversions of office buildings into residential buildings in New York City, a complicated undertaking that some developers have pitched as a way to address the city’s housing crisis.
Such conversions pose a number of structural challenges, making them difficult — and costly. Office buildings are laid out differently than residential apartment buildings; adjustments to ceiling height, plumbing and the space between walls are among the issues that developers must account for.
More of the ambitious projects were begun, however, after the city and state started offering incentives, such as tax exemptions, according to a 2025 report from the city comptroller’s office. The report noted 44 completed, in-progress and potential conversions as of the first quarter of that year.
MetroLoft lists more than a dozen completed conversions on its website, including 25 Water Street, a project in Lower Manhattan.
In an interview on Spectrum News NY1 this week, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that there would be a “full investigation” into what led to the issues on East 42nd Street.
Asked if the incident posed a warning about office-to-residential conversions, and his administration’s efforts to streamline them, Mr. Mamdani said that “streamlining and safety are not in tension.”
“I think that office-to-residential conversions are and will continue to be an important part of our response to the housing crisis,” he said.
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