Crews will jack up the sagging floors of the former Pfizer Building, a fraction of an inch at a time

Repairs to the former Pfizer headquarters in Midtown, where two steel columns buckled in July and raised fears of a collapse, are set to take a major step next week, when crews begin jacking the tower's sagging floors back into place, Gothamist and The New York Times reported.

The city Buildings Department approved the plan on Wednesday, according to the Times. The building at 235 E. 42nd St. is being converted from offices into what Gothamist describes as a roughly 1,600-unit apartment complex, the largest office-to-housing conversion the city has seen.

A slow, measured lift

Engineering plans filed with the Buildings Department show crews will raise the floors in increments of 1/64 of an inch, about the thickness of a business card's edge, Gothamist reported. The outlet said the floors will eventually be lifted about 7 inches; the Times put the total at roughly six.

Engineers told the Times the work depends on detailed computer modeling and an array of gauges that measure how loads shift through the old building and its new addition as hydraulic jacks push upward. Two structural engineers who reviewed the plan for Gothamist called it safe and incremental. "It's testing the system," said Abi Aghayere, a Drexel University professor.

The Buildings Department said the repair will be overseen by agency engineers and will not require street closures or evacuations, the Times reported. "We would not allow any work to proceed in the city if we thought it was posing a hazard to the public," a department spokesperson said in a statement quoted by both outlets. Gothamist said the plan was also reviewed by an independent engineering firm.

A change of strategy

Right after the July 7 failure on the 21st floor, the developer MetroLoft said it would rebuild the section of the tower above the bent columns. According to the filings reviewed by Gothamist, the company has since switched to repairing it in place. Records show the damaged columns were removed last month. MetroLoft declined to comment to both outlets.

The project added four stories to the original 33-story tower and expanded 10 floors directly above the columns that failed, Gothamist has reported. A Times investigation over the summer found that steel plates meant to reinforce the two columns, and four others, had not been installed before the buckling, even though they were part of the structural plans.

The Buildings Department has not released the results of its investigation into what went wrong. After the incident, the agency reviewed other office conversion projects and did not find problems, Gothamist reported. City leaders, including Mayor Zohran Mamdani, have backed office conversions as a quick way to add housing.