Stabilization Efforts of Compromised Pfizer Building Persist

The situation at the old Pfizer building in Midtown East appeared to be calming down on Wednesday morning as officials began reopening streets.

People were allowed back into nearby buildings on Wednesday morning as the so-called “frozen zone” around 235 East 42nd Street shrank, Bloomberg reported. Fire Department units were also leaving the scene, according to the publication, as a source said the building’s threat of collapse had waned.

The buckling 20th and 21st floors saw shoring installed overnight to help stabilize the construction site. On Tuesday night, Department of Buildings commissioner Ahmed Tigani said it was “a consistent, stable, safe situation.”

As of Wednesday morning, there were still five buildings under full or partial evacuation orders, according to the New York Times, including a Hampton Inn. Protestors also made their way to the scene; a truck also pulled up on Wednesday morning, referring to the site as a “Crime Scene” and accusing the developers of “cutting corners.”

Officers from the FDNY responded to 235 East 42nd Street around 8 a.m. on Tuesday morning over reports of bricks falling from the high-rise property. Officials discovered several sagging floors on the upper levels, as well as two buckled support columns, and ordered evacuations for construction workers, along with nine nearby buildings, as a precaution.

Later in the day, Metro Loft Management’s Nathan Berman told The Real Deal that reports of the building’s impending collapse have been “blown a little bit out of proportion,” adding that despite videos of sagging upper floors and buckled support columns, the building “was never at risk of collapse” and the issues are “fixable.”

“This was well designed, and approved by structural engineers,” said Berman. “This is a freak accident that something occurred with these two specific columns that either were not reinforced or were not reinforced sufficiently, and they gave way.”

Metro Loft partnered with David Werner to combine two buildings that formerly housed the headquarters of Pfizer into one residential development with about 1,600 units. Part of those plans for 235 and 219 East 42nd Street included adding floors to 219 East 42nd Street, while redesigning the building at 235 East 42nd Street.

Berman said his team will need to replace the two collapsed columns and raise the sagging floors. The developers are two and half months ahead of schedule, according to Berman, so the repairs will put the project back on its original timeline, which is scheduled for completion in 2027.

— Holden Walter-Warner