The Most Important Three-Word Phrase

There has been a lot of discussion in our office – as there has been everywhere in NYC – about the ongoing issues at 235 East 42nd Street. All the information I have is from the press and therefore is pretty much the same information everyone else has. The silly errors from the early reporting – the live load in an apartment house is less than the live load in an office building, not more; the piece of steel running vertically is a “column,” not a “beam” – are mostly gone, and there have been no overtly dramatic pictures and we all hope there will not be any.

The pictures of the two failed columns are odd, with an elbow-like bend in the middle of each piece, halfway between two floors. The whole situation is obviously being debated by everyone, but structural engineers are all curious as to what caused that specific damage. I used the word “failed” above and that’s not a colloquialism: those two columns are in failure. It doesn’t mean the building will collapse (and it doesn’t mean it won’t) but it’s important to recognize that critical parts of the steel frame are in failure. The current actions being taken by the Department of Buildings and others are not to prevent a failure, but to prevent the existing failure from causing a collapse. Eventually, we will learn what happened there.

I’ve been asked to opine on the cause, on the fix, on the likely actions of the DoB, on what this means for high-rises, on what this means for residential conversions… I have all sorts of opinions, but there’s only one honest answer as of now: I don’t know. I will eventually, and I almost certainly will when just about everyone else does, because a forensic report is released by the DoB.