![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-2284529602-e1783543512432.jpg?w=2048\")
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The building at the center of this week\u2019s Midtown scare is the former Pfizer world headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street: a 33-story tower built in 1960 that, alongside its neighbor at 219 East 42nd, is being converted by Metro Loft and David Werner Real Estate Investments into roughly 1,600 apartments, the largest office-to-residential conversion in U.S. history. <\/p>\n
On Tuesday morning, the FDNY received reports of bricks falling from the building; inspectors found two support columns buckling on the 21st floor and floors sagging up through the 26th. Nine surrounding buildings were evacuated, a \u201cfrozen zone\u201d was established from First to Third Avenues, and by Tuesday night, crews had begun installing emergency shoring. No injuries were reported. Metro Loft\u2019s Nathan Berman attributed the buckling to added weight from new floors; while the site had racked up seven DOB violations and roughly $15,000 in fines over the past year for falling debris.<\/p>\n
Forensic and structural engineer Joseph Di Pompeo, who has more than 25 years of experience in structural engineering and forensic investigation and has testified as an expert witness before planning and zoning boards, and in New Jersey and New York state and federal courts, said the type of failure visible in photos and video doesn\u2019t support a steel-quality explanation\u2014which is what the FDNY first said at a press conference yesterday. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere is no material strength number in the formula\u201d for column buckling, he said. \u201cIt could be good, it could be bad, it could be terrible, but it still wouldn\u2019t affect what happened here.\u201d Buckling, he said, is governed entirely by two things: how long a column runs between braces, and how much load it\u2019s carrying.<\/p>\n
That distinction, Di Pompeo said, points instead toward a loading error: Either the engineering didn\u2019t properly account for the weight being added during the conversion, or construction sequencing put more load on a column than it was ever meant to carry. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s got to be one of those two things,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Metro Loft\u2019s own account lines up with that framing. Founder Nathan Berman told The<\/em> Wall Street Journal<\/em> additional weight added during construction on top of the building likely caused the two columns to buckle, calling the incident \u201cnothing more than a typical construction mishap\u201d and, later, a \u201cfreak accident.\u201d He told reporters the project overall was \u201cwell engineered, well thought through, and well executed, with the exception of those two columns that could not tak[e the load],\u201d and said the affected area was limited to a small section of one building.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also a lot of conversion work happening across the city all at once. In 2023, nearly 80 office buildings in New York had already been converted to residences over the prior two decades, with roughly 200 more potentially in play. That pipeline has grown substantially since: Developers are now on track to start 9.5 million square feet of new office-to-residential conversions in 2026 alone, more than double last year\u2019s pace and nearly twice the city\u2019s previous peak in 2008, with New York leading every U.S. metro at more than 16,000 units currently in conversion.<\/p>\n Goldman Sachs estimated in 2024 office prices would need to fall nearly 50% for conversions to be financially viable at scale, and one commercial real estate veteran told Fortune<\/em> 30% of office buildings are \u201cbasically worth nothing\u201d and will simply need to be torn down rather than converted.<\/p>\n With that volume, Di Pompeo said, minor structural issues during construction are common, but they just don\u2019t typically make news. <\/p>\n \u201cA lot of failures happen during construction,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of failures that happen during construction that nobody hears about, because it\u2019s not a collapse. It gets fixed, and everybody moves on.\u201d<\/p>\n He was skeptical the building\u2019s prior violations tell the real story, either. <\/p>\n \u201cEvery building in New York has one,\u201d he said, noting that most citations\u2014like the loose debris incidents on this site\u2014have little bearing on the type of column failure reported this week.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Officetoresidential #conversions #NYC #failures #fixed #worse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The building at the center of this week\u2019s Midtown scare is the former Pfizer world headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street: a 33-story tower built in 1960 that, alongside its… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11258,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1325,12843,1775,5476,3455,3400,2558,12840,12842,12841,131],"class_list":["post-11257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-construction","tag-conversions","tag-failures","tag-fixed","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-office-buildings","tag-officetoresidential","tag-pfizer","tag-worse"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11257\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Other conversion work happening in New York City<\/h2>\n