{"id":292224,"date":"2026-07-10T11:57:46","date_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:57:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/292224\/"},"modified":"2026-07-10T11:57:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-10T11:57:46","slug":"damaged-manhattan-tower-owner-to-reconstruct-15-floors-after-evacuation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/292224\/","title":{"rendered":"Damaged Manhattan Tower Owner to Reconstruct 15 Floors After Evacuation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The developer behind the Midtown Manhattan tower that was evacuated over structural concerns Tuesday says it has a plan to fix the issue, including reconstructing 15 floors that were added to the original building as part of its conversion into apartments.<\/p>\n

The height of the tower\u2019s 21st floor, which is taller than others at 235 East 42nd St., made two columns more susceptible to load, said Nathan Berman, chief executive officer of developer Metro Loft. Those columns weren\u2019t sufficiently reinforced, leading them to bend and causing some of the 15 cantilevered floors above to sag.<\/p>\n

Metro Loft now plans to replace the facade, slabs and steel on those floors.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are prepared to rebuild that portion of the building,\u201d Berman said in an interview. \u201cIt will be reskinned, everything will be leveled, fixed in place, and it will be brand new.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The damage at the tower, the former headquarters of Pfizer Inc., has highlighted the engineering challenges of office conversions, a strategy embraced by developers and officials including Mayor Zohran Mamdani as a way to address New York\u2019s housing shortage. Concerns over the building\u2019s safety led to evacuations and street closures in the surrounding area Tuesday, disrupting commutes and displacing residents.<\/p>\n

Construction crews are installing temporary supports at the building, and streets reopened as city officials deemed the tower stable. But building regulators have issued<\/a> a partial stop-work order to halt all non-emergency construction at the site.<\/p>\n

Berman said shoring and stabilization of the building is likely to be completed in the next day or two, after which Metro Loft will wait on city officials for further instructions. He emphasized that the structural concerns affect only about 18,000 square feet out of the entire 1.3 million-square-foot-project. That means less than 30 apartments, he said.<\/p>\n

Read More: Manhattan Developer of Midtown Tower Dismisses Fears of Collapse<\/a><\/p>\n

Metro Loft is planning more than 1,600 apartments at the site, one of the largest office-to-housing conversions underway in the US. Such projects are architecturally fraught, requiring buildings designed with large office floorplates to be divided into much smaller units each requiring windows, plumbing and elevator access.<\/p>\n

Industry experts said the issues at the damaged Midtown tower may ultimately require more extensive repair.<\/p>\n

\u201cEngineers rationally overestimate what they think the loads would be, underestimate how strong they think elements would be to simplify it, and therefore you would end up with a substantial margin of safety,\u201d said James LaFave, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor something to have caused the level of buckling seen in that column there, it\u2019s not some small perturbation from expectation that would make that happen,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s something substantial.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anil Agrawal, a professor in the civil engineering department at City College of New York, said the process to address the issue will likely be drawn out.<\/p>\n

\u201cA well-informed decision will require doing a very detailed analysis, very good inspection, some testing, and that might take several months,\u201d he said. \u201cThis is not something that can be done within days or even a month. I will say three, four, five months if people start working tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

Berman said that construction was several months ahead of schedule, so it\u2019s unlikely that this setback will impact the project\u2019s original timeline of opening this year, or its $720 million construction loan provided by Madison Realty Capital. A representative for Madison Realty declined to comment.<\/p>\n

Mamdani said Wednesday that the city will conduct a full investigation into the problems at the site, but noted that the issue wasn\u2019t necessarily a consequence of the residential conversion. He said that he still sees such projects as part of the answer to the city\u2019s housing crisis.<\/p>\n

\"\"Leila Bozorg, New York\u0092s incoming deputy mayor for housing and planning, Ahmed Tigani, commissioner of the New York Department of Buildings, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani arrive to speak to the media amid evacuations at the site.<\/p>\n

Ran Eliasaf, founder and managing partner of Northwind Group, which provided a $135 million acquisition loan secured by the ownership in 235 East 42nd St., said the incident is unlikely to dampen enthusiasm for office conversions. His firm is also financing the acquisition and pre-development of 675 Third Ave., another conversion by Metro Loft and David Werner Real Estate Investments, and is evaluating two additional projects.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis shouldn\u2019t have happened, it\u2019s very fortunate nobody was hurt, but they will figure out what happened and fix it,\u201d Eliasaf said. \u201cI don\u2019t think this has any implication on their implementation in the market.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Metro Loft prepares for repairs, the approval process will likely be ad hoc, according to David Bonowitz, a structural engineer. Building codes outline the rules for designing an addition or alteration, but they don\u2019t say much about when something goes wrong and the structure is damaged.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf everything had gone to plan, this is not something that you\u2019d have to figure out in the field,\u201d he said. \u201cEverything did not go to plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

Top Photo: Midtown Manhattan building Photographer: Michael Nagle\/Bloomberg<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The developer behind the Midtown Manhattan tower that was evacuated over structural concerns Tuesday says it has a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[12616,110912,75,110913,84,83,39592,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-292224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-building-construction","tag-building-conversion","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-building-collapse","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-metro-loft","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}