The Department of Buildings is forcing the developer behind New York City’s largest office-to-housing conversion project to hire an independent engineering firm to examine its structural plans after a structural failure that prompted a mass evacuation in Midtown last Tuesday.

But engineers and construction experts who spoke with Gothamist said that type of outside review should have been a requirement in the first place for a project adding 14 new or expanded floors to a 66-year-old building in the largest-ever conversion of its kind in the city.

“It is a very good idea, especially for these older buildings,” said Georgi Petrov, an architect and engineer with the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. “There isn’t always very good documentation of what the existing building is and they were designed under different codes with different engineering philosophies than what are designed today.”

Building records show that structural plans for the redevelopment of Pfizer’s former headquarters on East 42nd Street were not subject to a review by another engineering firm due to the project’s size. New York City's building code only mandates what’s known as a “peer review” for buildings larger than 1 million square feet, taller than 600 feet or in some other specific cases. Plans filed with the city list the building at roughly 667,000 square feet and about 430 feet tall.

Department of Buildings spokesperson Andrew Rudansky said the project is now getting that analysis in response to the near-disaster.

“Following the structural failure, we have ordered the property owners to contract the services of a third-party engineering firm (separate from their project team) to do their own independent review of all work at the site, and to conduct a forensic analysis of what went wrong,” Rudansky said in an email.

Jay Nelson Gorayeb, a construction accident attorney, said he thinks the city should lower the size requirement that triggers a review.

“Especially in a city where we're starting to convert everything to residential because we need housing, this is a low-hanging fruit that the Legislature can take to make at least somewhat of a difference,” said Gorayeb, who represents four people who were injured at the MetroLoft project site in the months leading up to structural failure.

In a brief interview Monday, Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg said the city was open to policy changes, like additional peer review requirements, that could prevent future structural failures.

"That's a question we'll be looking at as we investigate, you know, whether there's policy changes we need to make or procedure changes we need to make for buildings like this,” Bozorg.

The city periodically revises its building codes after convening committees of experts who make recommendations that need final approval from the City Council. Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, who chairs the buildings committee, told Gothamist she was studying the triggers for additional structural review.

The Department of Buildings has not yet determined what exactly caused a pair of steel structural columns on the 21st floor to bend on July 7.

As part of its plan to redevelop the office building into new apartments, owners MetroLoft and David Werner Real Estate added four additional stories to the original 33-story structure and expanded 10 floors directly above the collapsed columns.

MetroLoft Principal Nathan Berman told the New York Times he thought the columns had not been properly reinforced and could not bear the additional weight of the floors above. Berman declined Gothamist’s interview requests.

MetroLoft spokesperson Julia Bergman said the company is working closely with the Department of Buildings.

“Our focus remains on ensuring the site remains safe and that we can complete the repair work necessary to move forward with the successful completion of the project,” Bergman said.

MetroLoft has a decadeslong history with similar projects, particularly in the Financial District, where zoning rules have long allowed for housing conversions in older office buildings. The company has completed more than a dozen office-to-housing projects, according to its website.

On July 1, just six days before the structural failure at its Midtown building, the company purchased another office building for $104 million that it plans to convert to housing.

Petrov, an adjunct professor at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering, said his firm is working on a similar project to renovate an existing office building in Midtown whose owner sought peer review and submitted plans to another engineering firm.

“It’s another level of letting you sleep at night because you know a peer has looked at it,” Petrov said. “Maybe the threshold for requirements should be revisited. It seems like that project was a big enough change to the building where it would have been useful to have a peer review.”

Plans and applications submitted to the Department of Buildings for the former Pfizer office conversion list Christopher Behan of the firm GACE Consulting Engineers as structural engineer. Neither Behan nor his company have responded to multiple requests for comment about the lack of a peer review or what went wrong at the building.

New York City is in the midst of an office-to-housing boom, with developers so far completing 10 such projects with more than 4,200 new housing units since 2020, according to data from the Department of City Planning. Developers have also sought permits or begun work on 44 other projects with nearly 14,000 total apartments and condos planned, that data shows.

A basic check

A peer review serves as an independent, third-party evaluation of a given project’s structural plans, said Dan Linzell, dean of the School of Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

He said the outside engineer double-checks that designs “are based upon sound fundamental physics, mechanics and engineering principles.”

That can mean verifying calculations, as well as flagging omissions or faulty assumptions, he said.

The cost of a peer review is relatively low compared to other aspects of a multimillion-dollar development, said Chris Cerino, a former past president of the Structural Engineers Association of New York. He estimated that a developer might spend $100,000 to $200,000 to have a second firm review its engineer’s plans.

He said office conversion projects are common and often involve straightforward plans that do not need a second set of eyes in most cases.

But he said the Department of Buildings may consider mandating another layer of review when projects add a certain number of floors or square footage to an existing structure, as in the case of the former Pfizer Building's 14-story expansion.

“The magnitude of vertical growth might garner consideration of a peer review process,” said Cerino, who is also senior vice president and technical director of structural engineering at the firm STV. “Putting two stories on 12, that happens all the time. This was significant vertical growth on this one. That may garner a new trigger.”

But several engineers cautioned that it was too early to tell whether an additional review would have prevented the structural failure.

The problem may have been a contractor failing to follow plans, construction workers accidentally removing a key piece of reinforcement or safety inspectors overlooking a hazard – not a miscalculation or mistake by the engineer, said Brian Falconer, managing principal and structural engineer at Severud Associates Consulting Engineers.

“Until we know what happens, it’s impossible to say what we should have done to correct it,” Falconer said.