Maybe it was the ever longer shadow of 9/11—so easy to ignore until it falls darkly across you—that made New Yorkers freak out as much as they did during the second week of this past July. The proximate cause was the bending of two columns on the twenty-second floor of the Pfizer pharmaceutical company’s former headquarters (1960, by Emery Roth & Sons) on East Forty-Second Street, which the developer MetroLoft is converting into some 1,600 rental units (including the nontrivial portion of relatively affordable apartments required by newish city policies encouraging this innovative practice). It may not only have been an abundance of caution that prompted the mayor to close for days all those streets and evacuate all those buildings from Grand Central to the United Nations—establishing a dramatically named “frozen zone” as if in anticipation of a new ground zero. Maybe hype was added to alarm because there is more than one writer in our global capital of media who wishes that they had penned the legendary 1995 Joseph Morgenstern New Yorker magazine story about how architect Hugh Stubbins’s Citigroup Center was stealthily reinforced, several years after its construction (and after business hours) in August of 1978, to correct the structural engineering flaw that made the skyscraper surprisingly prone to catastrophic collapse in quartering winds.
Among such journalists may have been New York features writer Andrew Rice, who wrote a breathless account of how a manly young steamfitter clocked in around 6:00 a.m. on July 7 and noticed bemusing hairline fractures in a slab—“‘Holy shit,’ someone said in a video that would soon be posted to TikTok”—which led to a discovery that the columns had buckled under some of the weight of sixteen new stories added alongside the original building in the pocket of space left by a useful setback. It turned out that the specified plates that were to have converted those two I-profile columns into sturdier box-beam sections had not been welded on, an oversight obscured by enrobing puffs of fireproofing foam. Because midcentury steel-framed buildings were engineered with significant structural redundancy, a dramatic collapse did not come to pass. The affected sixteen floors, sagging four inches out of level, will be unbuilt and rebuilt. The usual criminal investigations, civil litigations, and recriminations among oversight agencies, developers, contractors, and unions are ongoing.
The discourse deployed the episode to cast doubt on the viability of all such conversions. Headlines supplied alarm. “Can Office-to-Residential Conversions Survive the Pfizer-Building Crisis?” fretted The New Yorker. The more transactionally minded correspondents over at The Real Deal dispensed with the question mark: “How the Pfizer Building Scare Could Push Developers to Rethink Vertical Conversion Plans.” That word, scare, was also enlisted over at The Washington Post—“New York construction scare highlights the challenges of converting offices into housing”—but the headline’s stated fear proved to be, behind the paywall, unmongered: Of all the experts interviewed for the triple-bylined report, “none said the high-profile setback should make people doubt the ability of engineers to complete such projects.” There is indeed no reason why this not uncommon instance of shoddiness in American construction should be thought particular to adaptive reuse. The largest previous example of the refreshingly sustainable conservation of lost-cost carbon and embodied energy—a 1,300-unit residential retrofit of the former headquarters at 25 Water Street of the New York Daily News, also involving MetroLoft—opened earlier this year, bearing without incident the weight of ten new stories on top of twenty-two old ones. Its only irredeemable offense was the attempted coinage of SoMA, for “South Manhattan.” Meanwhile, only 1,900 feet away as the crow flies, 670 feet above some squishy landfill at 16 Maiden Lane, a would-be luxury residential skyscraper has—though all new!—lingered for five years in unfinished and unoccupiable limbo, leaning three inches to the north.
That a construction mishap on East Forty-Second Street could even be contemplated by ostensibly serious people to undermine the whole concept of office-to-housing conversion suggests that advocates of adaptive reuse still face a kind of ew-my-peas-are-touching-my-mashed-potatoes aversion to the idea of integrating new and old construction—never mind that the structural steel doesn’t know if it’s virgin or vintage. The self-evident benefit of such projects to both the housing and climate crises still requires a denormalizing from the wasteful cycles of new destruction and new construction to which we became accustomed during the three-hundred-years of fossil-fueled civilizational energy surplus that is now ending. Turning away from all that and toward adaption and regeneration may appeal, according to your chosen prophets and preferences, by either forfending or portending that more radically rational suggestion: a moratorium on all new construction that would make of all the developed world a new kind of fascinatingly frozen zone.