Turning offices into homes: Manhattan’s solution to its housing crisis... but with some risks
A structural failure in early July forced evacuation of Pfizer’s former headquarters, an empty office building that was being converted into a residential complex
There are cities that grow outward, spreading across the landscape like an oil stain. That kind of growth is, broadly speaking, more convenient but harder in other respects, because to serve any development on the outskirts — any planned residential area, any subdivision — you have to deploy a whole system of services, communications, and infrastructure there, which sometimes — often — arrives after the housing in those new neighborhoods has already filled up with people.
Other cities, by contrast, have solved that last problem thanks to — or because of — their inability to expand. Cities that simply have nowhere left to go have learned to grow inward, to devour and regenerate themselves at the same time, creating new urban fabric from their own old flesh. Manhattan is the paradigmatic example. It is an island, and an island is a body with predetermined edges, an organism that cannot fatten so much as reorganize its insides, and for almost two centuries it has been continuously destroying and regenerating itself, a body that swallows its own redundant organs to give birth to others. It replaces industrial warehouses and depots with lofts, factories with galleries, and now, in the post-pandemic stir, it is beginning to turn offices into housing. Because that is what the 21st-century plague and the subsequent adoption of remote work have left in urban environments: entire floors emptied, vertical miles of gray carpet and modular cubicle walls where no one types anymore, tertiary arteries through which the blood — the workers — no longer circulates.
The technical name for that metamorphosis is conversion, and its justification is compassionate. New York is going through the worst housing crisis in its history while at the same time it has tens of millions of square feet of empty office space — above all in Midtown — awaiting use. So the equation seems to solve itself; where there is surplus office space and a shortage of homes, convert one into the other. It is cheaper than demolishing and rebuilding, and it is cleaner: there is no debris to haul to a landfill, no need to remake all the steel and concrete that are already standing there waiting for a second life. Recycle the skeleton instead of demolishing it. The idea is morally beautiful because the city throws nothing away, turning the failure of a work model into a remedy for a lack of shelter. And it works. Not very quickly, but in most cases it works. It is one of the few fronts where the housing crisis retreats instead of advances. That is why, when something breaks, it breaks loudly.
At 235 East 42nd Street, a block from the Chrysler Building, stands what for decades was Pfizer’s global headquarters: a sober, corporate 1970s steel-framed tower, the heart from which the pharmaceutical company pumped medicines and vaccines around the world. When the company left, the building remained intact on the outside and hollow on the inside — a body available for another soul. The one that took it on was the most ambitious in the country: 1,600 residences, a rooftop pool, a gym, 10,000 square feet of amenities... the largest office-to-residential conversion in U.S. history. But the project was not content simply to empty and refill; it wanted more floor area than the old tower offered, and to get it it did what organisms do when they need more mass. It grew. New floors were added on top — 10 stories that widened the building’s upper section, a new body mounted on the old one. And there, at that seam, at the joint where the skeleton of one era had to bear the weight of another, lay the problem.
On the morning of July 7, shortly before 8 a.m., bricks began to fall onto the sidewalk. When workers went up to inspect, they found the columns were buckling, bending — something no human being should see in an upright building. On the 21st floor, two steel supports slowly arched to one side, the beams deflected, the floor of the level above began to sag, and the whole lattice that was supposed to be rigid suddenly behaved like soft cartilage. They evacuated the building and the surrounding properties — a school, hotels, diplomatic offices, a church across the street — closed five streets, and marked out a collapse zone. The tower kept moving for several hours. A building, an inherently inert object, was alive. And it was alive in the worst possible way.
What happened, according to the investigators’ reconstruction, is that the joint was missing a vertebra. The approved plans had provided that the two columns just below the expansion should be reinforced over thirteen floors, from the ninth to the 21st, with welded steel plates wrapping them. In addition to adding material to the column, those plates — and forgive this brief structural aside — would have converted the I-shaped supports into square columns, a shape much more resistant to buckling. But according to the project’s own engineer, those reinforcements were not installed. The city had designed the vertebra the new body needed, and someone, somewhere in the chain, did not weld it. The columns remained I-sections where they should have been boxed, and they supported the extra weight of 10 floors until they could no longer do so.
That is the most likely hypothesis at this time, although it is best not to speak with vehemence, because the official cause remains undetermined, and around the building — now shored up and, in principle, stable — the usual fight over responsibility and insurance is underway, with each party retreating to its side and pointing at the other. So while the engineer said one thing, the developer has called it an “unusual accident” and left open the possibility that the columns were reinforced, but with plates that were too thin, which would shift blame, you guessed it, onto the engineer, who therefore would have failed to have calculated them correctly.
We don’t know what will actually happen to the building, but we can predict with some accuracy what will happen to the gradual conversion of offices into residences, at least in New York. Mayor Zohran Mamdani said: “This is not a necessary consequence of converting an office into a residence.” The metamorphosis did not fail. The idea that one body can house another, or even the idea of regrowing it, did not fail. What failed was a vertebra.
Meanwhile, the city continues to mutate. The tower on 42nd Street remains shored up like a convalescent, waiting for the plates it was denied, but in a hundred other directions across Midtown and lower Manhattan other dead offices are preparing to be reborn as homes. Because, at its core, a city is that: a colossal organism that keeps shedding skin, that insists on creating new life from its own spent material, and that from time to time — only occasionally, only when a tiny, essential piece is missing — reminds us that every metamorphosis is also, while it lasts, a dangerous trance.
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