Midtown Manhattan blocks evacuated after beams buckling at construction site

comrade1234•about 1 hour ago

They're adding a hunch of floors to an existing building - it was the old Pfizer headquarters and they want to turn it into apartments. Someone either didn't do the proper engineering study, or the original specs weren't accurate.

Figuring out who to blame will probably take years in court.

danofsteel32•about 3 hours ago

This is a little pedantic but the pictures seem to show failing support columns not beams.

Beams are horizontal and columns are vertical.

cromka•41 minutes ago

Having seen the photos, I simply can't imagine how can they recover from that.

pram•about 3 hours ago

I'm not an expert but those look like pretty wimpy columns? Kind of surprising, when I worked in a tower it had exposed concrete columns that were very thick in comparison

rcxdude•about 2 hours ago

I think the first picture is not showing structural columns: they're more a symptom (buckling as the building is moving) as opposed to the cause.

gorjusborg•about 3 hours ago

Does anyone here have any knowledge of how something like this gets resolved?

Anon1096•about 3 hours ago

Most likely the building gets stabilized and then anyone involved gets embroiled in lawsuits and it stays standing half finished for years. One Seaport is a famous recent example of an under construction skyscraper getting halted for structural issues. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane

onlypassingthru•about 3 hours ago

Yes, sometimes gravity resolves the problem for you.

ErroneousBosh•about 3 hours ago

Tie every helicopter you can find to the roof, gas the bent bit off, haul it away and drop it somewhere?

They'll likely shore it up with hydraulic props - probably going through the floor and ceiling to floor slabs above and below - to stabilise it, and then start demolishing the building bit by bit.

kylehotchkiss•about 1 hour ago

When you run the mental model of picking up a building with a bunch of surplus Hueys, do they not all collide together once they start bearing weight?

ErroneousBosh•about 1 hour ago

Not if you make the strings different lengths.

SilverElfin•about 3 hours ago

Given all the bad press around things like the millennium tower, I think once you have an issue like this, the building is done. No one will want to live there. And given structural problems with load bearing beams, I would expect the building has to be demolished. But maybe they can demolish it top down partially and rebuild up from the compromised area if the city and engineers deem that safe.

fiatpandas•about 3 hours ago

Knocking down a building like this will be a huge pain, extremely expensive, and very dangerous. I think you can assume the developers will try desperately to retrofit the building before demo. There’s good precedence for this even in New York City. Look into the Citicorp case study.

kylehotchkiss•about 1 hour ago

The USA is mostly empty space. Trying to force upwards in such an already dense area just doesn't make sense. We are not constrained the way singapore is.

ChrisArchitect•about 1 hour ago

NYT updates (non-paywall) https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/07/nyregion/pfizer-buil...

Midtown Manhattan blocks evacuated after beams buckling at construction site

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