It's Wednesday, you deserve a treat, like an episode of the Hell Gate Podcast! Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The Midtown building that threatened to collapse Tuesday is, thank goodness, stable—for now.
At around 8 a.m. Tuesday, the New York Fire Department received calls that bricks were falling from the Pfizer Building at 235 42nd Street, one of many former office buildings being renovated into apartments across the city. Around the same time, construction workers inside the building realized that a “structural column”—a beam responsible for holding up the building—had actually buckled on the 21st floor. In fact, in a video captured from inside, the beam looks dangerously close to snapping like a twig in wildfire season. Not good!
The workers immediately "self-evacuated" (the official term for getting the fuck up out the building), and the 21st to 26th floors began to cave in "due to stress." Cliff Johnson, a construction worker and Steamfitters Union rep, told a reporter from amNY that the building contractors "obviously didn't add the right amount of steel, so the whole north side is crumbling. The I-beams are bending like cigarettes in there. Which is super dangerous."
The FDNY shut down the surrounding perimeter and evacuated nine nearby buildings, including two hotels and a private school where 400 kids were having summer camp. Inspectors from the Department of Buildings showed up to assess the situation. FDNY monitors noted that, by midday Tuesday, the building "continued to move." The New York Times started a live blog.