Manhattan Apartment Building Under Construction Stabilized After Columns Buckle

Crews worked overnight to shore up a massive, under-construction apartment building in Manhattan after some of its columns buckled and floors sagged, triggering widespread evacuations and street closures over concerns about a collapse.

Officials said the building, once the former headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, has been stabilized, but some surrounding buildings were still under evacuation orders and normally busy midtown streets remained closed Wednesday as work continued at the site.

“The two most important things right now is making it stable and safe for the people who are working inside, for the people who are nearby,” Ahmed Tigani, commissioner of the city's Department of Buildings, said late Tuesday.

Authorities responded to emergency calls at the building early Tuesday to discover two mangled support beams and sagging floors on its 21st floor. The building itself, along with a wide stretch of a bustling area not far from the Grand Central transit hub and the Chrystler Building had to be evacuated and closed to pedestrians.

On-site contractors were eventually allowed to reenter the building to do the emergency repairs after city officials did a floor-by-floor inspection. The building was empty other than the workers.

The renovation project is billed as the largest office-to-residential conversion in the city’s history, creating some 1,600 units of housing. The plans call for transforming a pair of office buildings by adding more than a dozen stories atop one tower and redesigning another tower.

MetroLoft, the project developer, has said the building itself is not at risk of collapse and that no debris fell from the building, though Nathan Berman, the firm's founder has acknowledged the added weight from widening the top 15 or so floors of the building likely caused the damage.