Pfizer Building Office-to-Residential Conversion

under construction with structural crisis

The Pfizer building, a thirty-seven-story tower in midtown Manhattan originally built in the 1960s, was being converted from office space to a mixed commercial-residential complex by a real-estate group led by Nathan Berman starting in 2024. The project involved transforming the older office towers into apartments to address New York City's housing crisis. However, during construction in 2026, steel support columns on the twenty-first floor buckled, causing a structural crisis that required emergency reinforcement with steel struts. The incident raised concerns about construction practices, safety, and oversight, leading to investigations and potential changes in the real-estate conversion industry.