Few ideas in housing have generated more excitement and opportunity over the past decade than the conversion of old office buildings into new apartment complexes.
After office buildings emptied during the COVID-19 pandemic, New York state and city officials have enacted a range of measures and tax breaks to incentivize the conversion of sterile structures once filled with filing cabinets and watercoolers into boutique apartment complexes with panoramic-windowed bedrooms, home offices and plenty of amenities.
The largest project of them all was underway at Pfizer's former headquarters in Midtown — until steel beams in the tower's middle floors nearly snapped in half Tuesday morning.
The extreme structural failure prompted city officials to clear the building, evacuate neighboring towers, and close several blocks in one of the country's busiest sections. By Tuesday evening, officials had begun allowing residents to return to some nearby buildings as engineers worked to stabilize the structure.
It also left structural engineers and construction experts perplexed as to what happened, especially given the city’s stringent requirements for turning old buildings into new apartments.
“The filing process is enormous,” said Eugene Gurevich, a principal and forensics team leader at the engineering firm RAND. “You have to account for everything that happens to a building structurally from start to finish.”
Gurevich, whose firm has worked on other office conversion projects, said developers must ensure older structural components meet current rules, a process that demands intensive investigation and analysis, monitored by the Department of Buildings.
“In some ways, it's more difficult than new construction because you have to figure out what you have before you can figure out what you can do,” he said.
Attorney Michael De Chiara, who represents developers, engineers and government agencies in construction disputes, said he doesn't expect the structural failure to hinder other conversion plans.
“It should have no impact on those projects going forward because this is something that rarely, rarely happens and we have to understand what the real mechanism was,” De Chiara said. “It’s obviously a structural failure. It is either design-related, construction-related, or both, and that has to be determined.“
Department of City Planning data shows more than 3,000 apartments and condos have been added to the city’s housing stock through office conversions since 2020. More than 2,000 are currently under construction.
The city’s decision last year to rezone a 42-block section of Manhattan between West 23rd and West 40th streets from commercial and manufacturing to new housing will only allow for even more conversions.
Government officials and housing experts have cheered the conversion as a way to repurpose older, underused buildings to address the city’s dire housing shortage. Former Mayor Eric Adams was a particular fan of the projects, which he routinely touted as a centerpiece of his housing plans.
And the development team and architect involved in the East 42nd Street conversion are no strangers to the projects.
Developer Metroloft has completed more than a dozen similar projects in New York City, according to its website. Its apartment complex at 25 Water St., which opened last year, is the largest in the city.
The largest office-to-residential conversion in the United States at 25 Water Street.
A Metroloft spokesperson declined to comment on potential causes. A spokesperson for the architecture firm that designed the project, Gensler, also declined to comment.
The engineer listed on the building's applications, Christopher Behan, and his company, GACE Consulting Engineers, did not respond to requests for comment.
Structural failures, while rare, can nevertheless terrify New Yorkers accustomed to living, working and relaxing stories above the streetscape.
A 2023 parking garage collapse in Lower Manhattan that killed one longtime worker was caused by unsafe demolition and neglect.
Later that year, the corner of a Bronx apartment building collapsed after construction workers removed load-bearing bricks under the direction of an engineer whose crucial error led the city to suspend his license. And the corner of a Bronx public housing building collapsed in October 2025 after a gas explosion. No one was injured in either residential collapse.
City codes require office buildings to withstand higher weights per square foot than residential structures, said Eric Cowley, an engineer who inspects buildings.
“Any commercial building should be able to handle being converted to residential,“ Cowley said. “It’s a lighter load than it has been experiencing.”
