NYC building on E. 42nd St. in danger of collapse, evacuated after columns buckle

Construction workers at a Midtown Manhattan skyscraper under a massive renovation were evacuated Tuesday after two interior columns began to buckle — leading first responders to fear a collapse could be imminent, FDNY officials said.

Hours after the 8 a.m. evacuation, the buildings and streets around 235 E. 42nd St. near Second Ave. remained closed off because there was “additional movement in one of the compromised columns,” Mayor Mamdani said at a press conference at the scene.

But by the afternoon, the movement had stopped, at least temporarily, and FDNY crews had entered the building to try to shore up the affected steel, officials said.

The steel-framed skyscraper once held offices for Pfizer, but is now being renovated into luxury residential housing, the largest such conversion in city history. The project is slated to create 1,602 apartments.

With the building still unstable, no one is allowed inside, city officials said. The FDNY and the city’s Department of Buildings were monitoring the small shifts in structure with the use of drones.

“This is a fast developing situation,” Mamdani said. “We’re taking it minute by minute.”

Firefighters were first called to the scene for a report of bricks falling from the facade of the 37-story building. But when they arrived, firefighters learned that two columns had buckled on the 21st and 22nd floors, causing floors to sag between the 21st and 26th floors.

“The box beams, the steel beams, started to bend and deflect from the weight (of the building),” FDNY Chief of Department John Esposito said earlier in the day. “We began evacuating and the building continued to move as we are on the scene.”

“There is continual movement,” he added. “It’s not stable and it’s a serious and dangerous situation.”

Members of Steamfitters Local 638 were working on a sprinkler system in the building when the beams began to buckle.

“The beams had bent like cigarettes,” union member Cliff Johnson said. “The north side of the building is crumbling. The sheetrock and studs, they’re bent in half right now.”

“There’s cracking windows, bent beams and concrete falling from the roof below,” he added. “They were shoring it up when everyone was evacuated.”

No injuries were reported as firefighters evacuated the building and set up a frozen zone closed to all pedestrian and vehicular traffic from E. 40th to E. 45th St. between First and Third Aves.

Seven buildings around 235 E. 42nd St. were also evacuated, including the Israeli Consulate and the Kennedy International School, a private school that was running a summer camp for Pre-K through fifth grade.

Some 400 children had to be evacuated from the school, which was set to focus on space exploration this week, according to the school’s website.

Also closed was CUNY’s main central offices and CUNY’s welcome center, officials said.

Keith Lopez, a handy man for a building near the scene, said some of his coworkers were scared of a potential full collapse and went home early.

“It’s crazy,” Lopez said. “I don’t know how they’re doing construction and the beams that bend and broke were on the floor where they were doing construction.”

But Lopez said he had to come see for himself.

“I was out here because I was being nosy myself, and when I came in they already had 43rd and 42nd closed off,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”

He said there is no room in construction for short cuts.

“We seen a crane collapse, scaffoldings. It’s always in the back in my mind something can happen but you got to take precaution,” Lopez said. “If people do their job correctly none of this would’ve happened,”

Shariffa Ali, 35, said the building scare ruined his morning commute to his job at the United Nations.

“Everyone is freaking out about it,” Ali said. “You got the police force, you got Con Edison, FDNY, all these branches of government, so it’s going to cost the city,”

But Mamdani said they were taking no chances.

“We are only going to allow them to return to their buildings once it is safe to do so,” Mamdani said of the evacuations.

“This just started happening this morning and it happened fast,” Johnson said. “I’ve been in construction for 21 years and never seen a beam bend in half like that. It’s super dangerous.”

If a collapse did occur, Esposito said it would be a “localized collapse.”

City officials said that building owners had been given approval to add eleven additional floors to the building.

Johnson surmised that the builders either didn’t use enough steel or use the right steel to carry the extra weight.

“I don’t see anyone coming back to this job for a month at least,” he said, adding that the renovation, with the exception of the sprinkler system, was done with non-union labor.

“You’re going to have engineers coming in here like you wouldn’t believe making sure everything is supported. They’ll be figuring out how much did (the building) sink, how much more it will sink.”

Since the building is still unstable, City Buildings Department Commissioner Ahmed Tigani said agency inspectors were “evaluating from the street and from vantage points across the street.”

Once the building is deemed stable, city officials and buildings contractors will install emergency struts that will “take the load” for the upper floors, Tigani said.

“We may have to bring in additional struts for weakening or cracks somewhere else,” he said. “Emergency beams and columns may also be brought in.”

The Buildings Department “went through an extensive plan review” before the permits were approved, Tigani said.

Only after the building is stable will the investigation begin into what happened, he said.

“We will have to launch an investigation into what is the cause, why the undermining happened,” Tigani said.

With Cayla Bamberger and Leonard Greene