Midtown Manhattan Office-to-Residence Conversion Stalls After Structural Buckling

On Tuesday, steel columns on the 21st floor of the former Pfizer headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street buckled, causing floors to sag and prompting the evacuation of the building and nearby structures. Workers installed temporary supports while city officials assessed the damage. Department of Buildings commissioner Ahmed Tigani later said the tower was stable but warned that the “frozen zone” around the site would remain in effect for several days.

New York Times

The pandemic left many Manhattan office towers under-occupied, spurring a citywide push to convert vacant offices into housing. New York updated its zoning code in 2024 to allow such adaptive reuse, and a 2025 comptroller report listed 44 conversion projects either completed, underway, or ready to proceed. The Pfizer site, vacated in 2023 after the company moved to a new Penn Station office, began conversion work in 2024. The plan calls for roughly 1,600 apartments by adding more than a dozen stories to a 1960s steel-frame building and threading a new 30-story concrete tower through a 1909 structure.

CNN

• MetroLoft – developer of the conversion.

CNN

• Gensler – architectural firm overseeing design and construction.

CNN

• Emily Guglielmo – San Francisco-based structural engineer consulted on the project.

Associated Press

• Ben Schafer – Johns Hopkins University structural-engineering professor.

UsNews and World Report

• Joshua Harris – director of Fordham University’s Real Estate Institute.

UsNews and World Report

• Andrew Alpern – architectural historian who warned about the project’s feasibility.

CNN

• The conversion would add about 1,600 residential units.

CNN

• As of early 2025, NYC had 44 adaptive-reuse projects in various stages.

UsNews and World Report

• Office vacancy in Manhattan stood at 12.4 % in Q1 2026, compared with 5 % in Los Angeles and 28.9 % in Chicago.

CNN

• Buildings and construction account for roughly 40 % of global energy-related carbon emissions.

UsNews and World Report

The incident underscores the engineering complexity of “surgical” conversions that must support new loads while preserving existing structures. It also serves as a “gut check” for developers and city officials, who may now scrutinize other pending projects to assure safety and maintain public confidence in large-scale housing solutions.

CNN

Commissioner Tigani affirmed the building’s current stability and the city’s emergency response plan. Guglielmo emphasized that robust building codes and inspections make such failures rare. Schafer noted that the buckling does not undermine engineers’ overall understanding of adaptive reuse. Harris framed the setback as an expected risk in the broader effort to address New York’s housing shortage.

Associated Press

Architectural historian Andrew Alpern had previously expressed doubt that the Pfizer tower’s design could accommodate apartments, citing window and layout constraints. MetroLoft founder Nathan Berman later acknowledged that the added weight from widening the top 15 floors likely caused the damage.

CNN

City officials have not yet identified a definitive cause for the column failure. While Guglielmo and Schafer point to the added load as the probable factor, the Department of Buildings has stopped short of confirming this hypothesis.

UsNews and World Report

• “In cities and towns that don’t have that available geography, you’re going to see a lot more of this type of a design where there’s an adaptive reuse to an existing building,” — Emily Guglielmo, Structural Engineer

Associated Press

• “We’re very fortunate here in the United States that we are not seeing these types of failures on a day-to-day basis,” — Emily Guglielmo, Structural Engineer

Associated Press

• “I don’t think it really brings into question our understanding of how to do something like this,” — Ben Schafer, Structural Engineering Professor, Johns Hopkins University

UsNews and World Report

• “This is part of the reality of fixing the housing crisis,” — Joshua Harris, Director, Fordham University Real Estate Institute

Associated Press

• “The project bothered me right from the start, and now this has happened,” — Andrew Alpern, Architectural Historian

CNN

The city has launched an investigation into the buckling, and developers of other adaptive-reuse projects have indicated they will review designs for similar load-bearing risks before proceeding.

UsNews and World Report