Officials confident shoring has stabilized buckling former Pfizer tower in Manhattan

Emergency shoring has stabilized the former Pfizer global headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street after inspectors found two buckled structural columns on the 21st floor, along with cracks and sagging floors, inside the Midtown Manhattan tower. City officials were still monitoring the building on Wednesday, July 8, after a day of evacuations and street closures around one of the city’s largest office-to-housing conversions.

FDNY received reports around 8 a.m. Tuesday, July 7, at an active construction site between Second and Third avenues. The NYPD sealed off a frozen zone from 40th to 45th Streets between First and Third avenues, and at least nine neighboring buildings were evacuated as a precaution. No injuries were reported, all workers were accounted for, and the tower remained unstable even after the first round of emergency measures.

Temporary shoring braces a compromised building and keeps damaged floors or columns from giving way while engineers evaluate the structure. Crews began installing jacks and new steel to support the affected area, while FDNY drones and a third-party engineer were brought in for a second look. Officials were confident the emergency work was stabilizing the situation. Fire officials considered a full collapse onto the street less likely than an internal partial collapse, the kind of failure that can spread through the building without bringing the entire structure down at once.

Permits filed as of May 2025 showed 1,463 apartments, according to the city comptroller’s office. The project is part of the largest office-to-apartment conversion in city history, and recent blueprints added four more floors of apartment space at the top of the 37-story tower. The building sits in a dense Midtown East corridor near Grand Central Terminal, the Chrysler Building and the United Nations headquarters, where even a limited structural failure can affect streets, transit and nearby towers.

According to Ahmed Tigani of the Department of Buildings, the building had undergone an extensive review over the past two years, and investigators are now trying to determine why the undermining happened. The city issued a complaint over excavation work at the foundation, alleging it was not approved or permitted. Two dozen complaints have been filed against the building since last year, although formal violations were often not issued because inspectors did not observe a problem on site. The city’s Office Conversion Accelerator was created to speed office-to-residential projects and help owners complete code-compliant conversions.