NYC building threatening to collapse stabilized with emergency jacks; some street closures lifted

The sagging upper floors of a midtown Manhattan building under construction that threatened to collapse and caused a massive evacuation of the area has been stabilized with galvanized steel beams and emergency jacks, city officials said as they’ve reduced the area’s frozen zone to just two blocks.

As of Wednesday morning, the only streets closed off around 235 E. 42nd St. are E. 42nd St and E. 43rd St. between Second and Third Avenues, city Department of Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said at a presser outside the building late Tuesday.

The steel-framed skyscraper once held offices for Pfizer, but is now being renovated into luxury residential housing, the largest such conversion in city history. The project is slated to create 1,602 apartments.

Once it appeared that the building had stopped shifting on Tuesday afternoon, emergency crews went up to the 21st floor and began shoring up the steel beams that had visibly buckled during the ambitious construction project that would have added 11 more floors to the building.

“The building is stable and we are confident in the emergency plan we have now,” Tigani said.

The emergency crews stabilized the building to the point that the city reduced the frozen zone to just E. 42nd St. and E. 43rd St., although three adjoining buildings — 815 Second Ave., 235 E. 43rd St., and 231 E. 43rd St. — remain under a full vacate order. Residents living in 217 E. 43rd St. are allowed to go back home, but the restaurant on the first floor remains under a vacate order, Tigani said.

When city officials feared the building would collapse Tuesday morning, the FDNY set up a frozen zone from E. 40th to E. 45th St. between First and Third Aves.

Construction crews were evacuated from the building at 8 a.m. Tuesday. Firefighters were first called to the scene for a report of bricks falling from the facade of the 37-story building. But when they arrived, firefighters learned that two columns had buckled on the 21st and 22nd floors, causing floors to sag between the 21st and 26th floors.

“The box beams, the steel beams, started to bend and deflect from the weight (of the building),” FDNY Chief of Department John Esposito said Tuesday. “We began evacuating and the building continued to move as we are on the scene.”

No injuries had been reported, but the building continued to shift for most of Tuesday morning. By the afternoon, the shifting had stopped long enough to risk bringing in emergency crews to brace the impacted floors, officials said.

“We have not seen any movement from our monitoring positions set up outside and inside the building,” Tigani said. “If there is any movement, we have protocols to quickly remove people from the building.”

Tigani said the city has been in constant discussions with the owner of the property as well as the contractor. An independent engineering company has also been brought in as a third party to make recommendations on how to stabilize the building.

Once the building is stabilized, an investigation into what caused the collapse will begin, Tigani siad.

Developers were allowed to gut and renovate the building last summer. Since then, contractors have been hit with more than $30,000 in workplace safety violations, city records show.

The violations include reports of construction crews “blowing material off the roof with a leaf blower” as well as unsafe demolition practices.