Support Columns Buckle at Former Pfizer Tower, Prompting Evacuations of Nine Buildings

Two support columns buckled on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer world headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street on Tuesday morning, causing floors to sag through the 26th floor. The FDNY received reports of bricks falling from the 33-story tower built in 1960, which Metro Loft and David Werner Real Estate Investments are converting with its neighbor at 219 East 42nd Street into roughly 1,600 apartments.

Inspectors identified the buckling shortly after the reports.

Nine surrounding buildings were evacuated and a frozen zone was established from First to Third Avenues. Crews began installing emergency shoring by Tuesday night. No injuries were reported. The site had accumulated seven Department of Buildings violations and about $15,000 in fines over the past year for falling debris.

Forensic and structural engineer Joseph Di Pompeo said the failure visible in photos and video does not indicate a steel-quality issue. He noted that column buckling depends only on the distance between braces and the load carried, pointing instead to a loading error during construction. Metro Loft founder Nathan Berman attributed the buckling to added weight from new floors.

He described the event to The Wall Street Journal as a typical construction mishap and a freak accident limited to a small section of one building. Di Pompeo said such issues occur during many conversions but rarely draw attention when they are fixed without collapse. Berman said the project was otherwise well engineered and executed.