A 37-storey skyscraper in the centre of New York City is shifting and at risk of collapse.
Pfizer’s former headquarters in Midtown Manhattan and its surrounding streets were evacuated on Tuesday, amid fears the building would fall and crush nearby buildings.
Hundreds of police cars and ambulances were outside the “collapse zone”.
A police official said there was a “high chance” the building could fall into the street.
The tilting glass building, which has been secured by temporary ropes, is being converted into 1,600 apartments, with an additional four floors added to the tallest section and 19 floors added to the neighbouring tower.
City officials, firefighters, TV crews, and passers-by stare up at the unstable building from behind police barriers.
The building appears to be tilting in photographs shared by the New York fire department – New York fire department
John Esposito, chief of New York’s fire department (FDNY), told reporters the high-rise was “moving” and that authorities had seen “continued shifting” of the structure.
Structural columns on the 17th and 21st floors are reported to have buckled, threatening the entire building’s stability.
“It’s a very serious situation because the box beams – the steel beams – have started to bend and deflect from the weight,” Mr Esposito said.
“We evacuated the building and started evacuations of surrounding buildings. The building has continued to move since we have been on the scene.”
Emergency services at the scene in Midtown Manhattan – OLGA FEDOROVA/EPA/Shutterstock
However, he added: “It’s a steel frame building, so it would not be a total collapse; it would be more of a localised collapse.”
On Tuesday afternoon, Zohran Mamdani, the city’s mayor, said the building remains “unstable”, describing it as a “minute-by-minute” assessment.
Sidra, who lives within 200m of the building, said she had been watching it for a few hours. “Every minute it has been leaning further to the left,” she told The Telegraph.
The cause of the beams’ collapse is currently unknown.
Zohran Mamdani, the city’s mayor, said the building remains unstable in a press conference on Tuesday – Olga Fedorova/EPA/Shutterstock
If completed, the office-to-apartment conversion would have been the largest in New York City and one of the most ambitious in the US.
The New York department of buildings filed a complaint against the project developers on Tuesday, accusing them of carrying out work beyond what was already approved.
The building has been under construction since 2024. It has had a total of 22 violations dating back to 2020, with 13 ongoing, according to The New York Times.
“It’s quite a bit of surgery,” Robert Fuller, a principal at Gensler, the firm behind the Pfizer conversion, told Bloomberg in 2025.
“There’s just a lot of technical challenges and unique conditions from floor to floor. All those things collectively make this quite a unique endeavour and I would argue probably more challenging than any other one I can think of.”
People have been asked to stay away from the site on East 42nd Street.
Roads and footpaths are closed between “East 40th to 45th streets between First and Third avenues, barring all pedestrian and vehicle traffic”, according to The New York Post.
A spokesman for MetroLoft, one of the developers, said there have been no injuries. A spokesman for New York’s department of buildings said: “No debris fell from the building.”
“We want to confirm that the affected area is a small section of one of the two buildings on this site,” the MetroLoft spokesman told The Architects Newspaper. “As the FDNY spokesperson noted, the entire building itself is not at risk of collapse.”