The developer behind the conversion of the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown is speaking out to quell concerns after the massive development site was the subject of an emergency response early Tuesday.
Hours after city officials warned of an “extremely dangerous situation” at the in-progress conversion of the former office property, Nathan Berman of MetroLoft said in an interview with 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.”
Berman said the added weight during construction likely led to columns bending. “It’s very simple,” said Berman. “You add more load to something that can’t support it, it’ll give way, and that’s what happened, and now it just needs to be fixed.”
Berman disputed a claim made earlier in the day by Cliff Johnsen of Steamfitters Local 638, who told reporters that the builders had not used enough steel to support the added weight.
“Total nonsense. 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. That’s it. There’s no mystery, and there’s no magic.”
Berman claimed that the overall space affected was only a 20-by-20-square-foot corner. He also denied reports that debris, including bricks, fell from the building, which Berman said has no bricks.
“This is a 1.3 million-square-foot project with an issue at the building’s northwest corner,” said Berman, adding that the building has a “huge base that is as stable as anything in the city.”
Officers from the FDNY responded to 235 East 42nd Street around 8 a.m. 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.
MetroLoft 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, one of the city’s most prolific office-to-residential converters, said the issues at the Midtown project could have happened at any construction project, not just a conversion, which typically involves redesigning a building’s floorplates.
“When you add more floor area, you do this according to certain plans, which we have, and then those plans were approved by the building department, but mistakes sometimes happen, or sometimes you run into a faulty column, which may have been cracked before, and it went undetected,” said Berman.
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.
“This is a very fixable issue, and something that our guys are experienced enough to fix,” said Berman.
Read more
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