At the Pfizer building on East Forty-second Street, earlier this week, disaster, and the sense of excitement that disaster can create, lingered. Cops refused to allow the curious to pass through barricades at the edges of a “frozen zone.” A huddle of emergency personnel pored over blueprints before breaking up to enter the stricken tower. A young woman ran by and asked if the building had fallen yet, while a summer hire from the New York Post tried to find people who had been there when the situation first went Code Red. But one CBS on-air reporter had it right. After the city had worked through the night, he announced, taking advantage of a lull in traffic on Second Avenue, things had gone "from unstable to stable.” “Got it,” his soundman said.

The Pfizer building stands opposite the old Daily News building, and one block from the Chrysler Building. The firm founded by the prolific New York City architect Emery Roth built the tower—technically two adjoining buildings—in the nineteen-sixties. Pfizer had its headquarters there for decades before, finally, looking for fresh office space. In 2024, a real-estate group led by Nathan Berman, a well-known converter of out-of-date office buildings into apartments, began transforming the towers—the taller of which was thirty-seven-stories high—into a mixed commercial-residential complex. Berman knew how to do it. He had built his career in New York on rehabbing such structures, even earning himself the nickname the King of FiDi, for his developments around Wall Street. I wrote about Berman, and his firm, Metro Loft Management, in 2024, when he was in the middle of one of his financial-district projects, on 55 Broad Street, and shortly after he had signed on to convert the Pfizer building, which was to be his biggest job ever. In a city plagued by a perpetual housing crisis, Berman’s repurposing of vacant office space had been wildly successful (“We’ve never had this kind of imbalance between demand and supply before,” he told me, in 2024) and fit with the popular push to do something—anything!—to alleviate it. In the past few municipal-election cycles, New York’s housing crunch has reliably been a major focus of voter concern, and the importance of turning the hundreds of sclerotic mid-century office buildings that splatter midtown like refuse from a party long since over into livable spaces has practically become an article of faith within New York City’s political class. (Pfizer relocated to dewy new Hudson Yards in 2023.)

But sometime Tuesday morning the city received a 911 call that some bricks were falling from the Pfizer façade. (The report later proved false.) Shortly after, the Fire Department responded to a report from construction workers that some of the steel support columns on the twenty-first floor were buckling. Despite their insouciance—the workers, in a video later posted on the internet, seemed to be in no hurry to get out—this was not something you ignore. Construction sites have lots of mishaps, big and small, but columns don’t buckle halfway up skyscrapers. Columns that fail cause other columns to fail. Steel columns that fail are the worst kind, according to Joel Silverman, a well-known construction consultant based in New York, because while concrete columns pancake, the “collapse modality” in a steel building is that they “topple.” He added, “And therefore the footprint of the failure is, what, thirty-five stories or five hundred feet.” Suddenly, a project launched with great energy and acclaim—a recent piece on Berman and conversions disclosed that he was adding a floor every four days—had the makings of the Titanic.

If so, Berman, who had previously been celebrated for bringing conversions to the city that were, if not cheap, at least not pornographically expensive, was suddenly a potential J. Bruce Ismay. Buildings don’t just typically fall over; someone, in all probability, made a mistake in building them. The Pfizer conversion used almost no organized labor, which did not make the unions happy; nearly the only union workers on the site were the steamfitters, who immediately claimed that Berman skimped on steel. (He has called the charge “total nonsense.”) Scabby, the inflatable rat, quickly made an appearance at the site. The carpenters’ union deployed a truck to the area with an electronic readout sign: “Crime Scene,” one message read. “1,600 residential units at risk due to cutting corners.” Another readout asserted “Shame on Metroloft.” (Berman told me he would not comment on the Pfizer situation.)

In the world of New York City real estate, Berman is prominent but neither famous nor infamous. Mike Vatter, of the Laborers’ Union, told me that Berman was just “one of many.” And, although the current mayoral administration wants new units in old buildings, Berman’s projects don’t exactly fit neatly within the Zohran Mamdani mold. In 2024, as we toured his Wall Street conversions, he pointed out amenities such as swimming pools and well-stocked gyms—luxe additions that had been planned for the Pfizer building as well. Creating housing for first-year associates at Goldman Sachs—which is how Berman told me he conceptualizes his work—qualifies you as a do-gooder only within the extraordinary economic microenvironment of Manhattan.

But, anyway, renown wasn’t what Berman sought, as he made clear when I wrote about him. For him, the puzzle of how to make money was what mattered—he likened converting an office building into a residence to solving a Rubik’s Cube. If the math didn’t work, he hollowed out cores and used the leftovers to add floors on top until it did. Berman’s passion for shoving as many units into as small a space as possible and then going big on plush facilities led one of his own architects to describe the developments to me as “slums for the rich.” He was unapologetic: “If the price per pound is right, I say, ‘Let’s go.’ ” Berman was born in the Soviet Union, in 1959, and another of his business principles, he explained, was to try to avoid any deal that involved government, i.e., he would not get involved in a project that required a change in zoning regulations. “Life is short,” he said.

Up until July 7th, none of this was a problem. But now, faced with a potential debacle on East Forty-second Street, Berman could have used a few friends—city officials, union leaders, the kind you make when you put your name on an art museum. (Before turning to real estate, Berman worked at his father-in-law’s art gallery.) It didn’t help that when Berman stepped up to explain the problem, he made the mistake of free-associating in front of a reporter. “This incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap,” he told the Times, on Tuesday evening. “It happens, unfortunately, far too often on construction sites: falling cranes, people—God forbid—falling off buildings, windows falling.”

Though attention immediately focussed on Berman, he wasn’t the only possible malefactor by any means. A conversion of this size isn’t a solo project. Berman isn’t the only owner of the structure—he shares that title with David Werner, known informally around the city as the King of Flips, whose sense of civic obligation makes Berman start to sound like a member of Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America. And where was Gensler, the global design and planning firm that would have submitted the architectural drawings? Or the structural engineer, the well-known firm Goldstein Associates Consulting Engineers? And the layers of inspection oversight that a renovation like this gets from the private inspectors that it hires, and ultimately from the city? According to the Times, which combed through “millions of rows of city violation records,” the inspection firm hired for the project had a history of errors and violations on previous jobs, for which the city assessed fines, not all of which the company appeared to have paid. Previous problems with the Pfizer-building renovation also came to light in the press—a fall off a ladder and objects that plummeted to the street below. Money, as George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “is not made in the light.” New York City real estate sometimes resembles a basement crawl space.

Since the buckled columns soared into the public consciousness on Tuesday, the city has moved in steel struts to reinforce the structure. By the front entrance on Forty-second Street, I could see piles of them lying on the nearby ground, ready to be deployed so that the Pfizer building might stand. A widely circulated image showed a warped column near a window under which Berman had installed a combo heat-slash-air-conditioning unit. I remember how proud he’d been about the units, which he had also installed at 55 Broad Street—it was cheaper, he told me, to install such units in every one of the thousands of apartments he was creating than to use central heating and cooling. No one had ever done it before, he explained: the technology was new; the business model was impeccable. That was the type of pride he took in his work. “You add more load to something that can’t support it,” Berman told The Real Deal, an industry publication, after the buckling at Pfizer. “It’ll give way, and that’s what happened, and now it just needs to be fixed.”

This sentiment was likely a bit optimistic. The crisis was over—sort of. The city’s frozen zone had thawed. The Casual Greek restaurant on East Forty-fourth had reopened. The problems, that Berman pointed out were contained to a twenty-by-twenty-foot corner of a 1.3-million-square-foot building, were no longer a threat. He shrugged off the experience, telling the Times, “I don’t know that a four-inch sag is a collapse.” He promised to get right back to work—and maybe he will. But the real-estate niche that Berman had carved out for himself in New York was likely forever changed. Or at least the financial calculations were. Two days after the incident, a developer told the Wall Street Journal that the days of high-wire stunts—like pulling out cores and sticking extra floors on the roof—might belong to the past. A real-estate lawyer warned of a “new Pfizer premium” on conversions in the near term. But first, Berman will have to deal with the immediate aftermath of July 7th. Mamdami has vowed a “rigorous” safety assessment before work resumes, and the city comptroller has vowed that there will be an investigation. Berman, who had long tried to minimize municipal interface, was about to enter his Room 101. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of union workers on site when Pfizer converted the building.