Two load-bearing steel columns buckled on the 21st floor of 235 East 42nd Street on July 7, the former Pfizer headquarters being converted to roughly 1,600 apartments. More than 200 workers evacuated. A collapse zone went up. Nobody was hurt. The question since has been whether this was a one-off or a preview.
“More than likely”
Norma Jean Mattei, the 2017 president of the American Society of Civil Engineers and professor emeritus at the University of New Orleans, was asked directly whether the conversion project type contributed. Her answer was “More than likely.”
Her reasoning is not complicated, which is what makes it worth taking seriously. Older buildings have “aged… degraded… may not have been maintained.” And with a high-rise, “you can’t see the skeleton, you can’t see the framing that’s actually holding the building up. And now you are going to take it and hold something up differently.”
That last clause is the engineering problem in one sentence. A 1970s office tower was designed for a specific load path. Conversion changes almost everything about that path: new floor openings for residential plumbing stacks, removed shear walls, relocated risers, added partition dead load, and temporary conditions during demolition where the structure is carrying a configuration nobody designed for. The permanent design may be sound and the sequence still fail.
The inspection regime doesn’t match the risk
Mattei pointed to Miami-Dade’s 40-year structural assessment mandate, tightened after Surfside, as a model New York may need. Manhattan’s facade inspection requirements are rigorous. Its requirements for assessing primary structural steel behind finishes in a building about to be gutted are considerably less so.
She expects more incidents. The housing shortage is pushing conversions forward faster than the engineering diligence around them has matured, and the buildings most attractive for conversion, older and cheaper with weak office demand, are also the ones with the least reliable as-built documentation.
Who’s willing to raise a hand
Mattei also drew a comparison to the 2019 Hard Rock Hotel collapse in New Orleans, which killed three workers. She raised whether non-English-speaking or undocumented workers “feel empowered to tell someone else up the chain,” and said she believes that played a part there.
That’s the uncomfortable part of the story. Column buckling is progressive. It gives warning, in deflection and in sound, to people standing next to it. Whether that warning reaches an engineer depends entirely on whether the crew believes reporting it is safe for them.
Her line on enforcement lands the same way: “if people know that you’ve got regulations in place, but you don’t enforce them, well, why have the regulations?” Source: Construction Dive.