Been a bit of a gap in posting here, but I couldn’t resist this story – even though it is in New York and not New Zealand.
Basically, a former office building is structurally unstable with columns buckling under its own weight, which is a VERY BAD THING. I’m surprised it is not all over the news here – it certainly is over the news in New York!
The building is, in a quirk of irony / fate, the former office building of Pfizer, famous for its rock hard erections that never go soft, and yet that seems to be exactly the problem here. Situated at 235 East 42nd Street, right near 2nd Avenue, the building is therefore right at the heart of everything – just a block down the road from the Chrysler Building, still the loveliest skyscraper in the world.
The project was a massive conversion job from offices into apartments, but has suddenly started going rather flacid and bending like a soft banana. That’s never a good thing. Columns are meant to be straight, not bent, and stay vertical and erect, not bending in the middle – that’s a disaster! There was going to be some 1600 new apartments completed by some time next year – might have to delay the programme a bit here guys! City Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani has confirmed that the existing 22 storey building was having 11 new stories added to the top, and that the fault is somewhere between level 17 and 21. No kidding – yes, we can see that directly below the new addition, the existing columns have given up the ghost and decided to go down the route of all who give up under pressure – a buckling at the knees, and a slow descent towards the floor.
I imagine that many lawyers and insurance companies have been contacted already. They have already closed off the street to pedestrian and to traffic – but of course it is just down the road from Grand Central Station, the busiest underground train station IN THE WHOLE WORLD and if the building was to collapse, that could also destroy infrastructure underground as well. It is marginally stable at this point, but if it continues to collapse, then all hell will break out.
New York Times says:
“Before columns buckled inside a Midtown Manhattan office tower on Tuesday, a private firm conducted several inspections of major structural alterations being done at the site — and apparently signed off on at least some of them, records and interviews show. The firm, Domani Inspection Services, certified the safety of high strength bolting, steel welding and the structural stability of changes being made as part of an ambitious project to transform the offices into a 37-story apartment building. It was not clear whether any of the work inspected by Domani contributed to the failure of columns on the 21st floor of the building. But a New York Times examination of the inspection company’s record has found that it has been repeatedly cited for missing warning signs at other building projects in the city. The damage at the building, at 235 East 42nd Street, forced the evacuation of several other buildings throughout the area, disrupting workplaces and choking off a vital thoroughfare during a time of peak tourism. The disruption has placed scrutiny on the future of office-to-residential conversions as a creative and efficient solution to the city’s crippling housing shortage.“
So – major rework needed, including finding some way of stopping any further collapse and also finding some way of jacking the falling floors back upwards again, but the developer Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”
Not sure that I would exactly describe this as a “typical construction mishap” maybe more like a serious cock-up and near miss. Anyway, as I have been reading continuous updates on this all day Thursday (our time) it now seems to have been stabilised by their Wednesday – with some seriously munty big SHS columns welded into place to make sure that nothing goes any further. Disaster averted. Lawsuits still to come. And, after that, I’m not sure that any one will ever want to buy a condo from Metroloft in this building. Still, people have short memories, so it is nothing that a name change and a rebrand can’t fix.
