My interest was piqued when tonight’s New York Times included an update on the ongoing structural problems at the former Pfizer building in Midtown Manhattan (235 East 42nd Street). Eight more columns have been found with missing or insufficient reinforcement than was previously known.[1]  I read it differently than I would have a month ago.

I also read it as someone who lived through a version of this story once before and with a very well known developer, Donald Trump.

In 1997, I had an apartment at 185 West End Avenue, facing the site where Donald Trump was building the first towers of his Riverside South development. I remember watching the buildings quickly appear. I also vaguely remember a construction problem that made news briefly and then vanished. What I did not remember, until I went looking, was how closely that 30-year-old episode matches what is happening at the Pfizer building right now, and what happened this summer at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington.

Three projects, three decades apart in one case, two sectors, one private and one public. The same mechanism runs through all of them. A deadline creates pressure. Someone with the authority to stop the work decides not to stop work. The public finds out only when something fails or someone outside the project looks more closely.

In 1997, the same pattern, in full

Riverside South had already survived nearly two decades of opposition by the time ground broke in January 1997. Community protests, four lawsuits and a lobbying campaign in Washington had all failed to slow it down. Trump had hired two contractors to build adjacent towers on the site and, according to his own project spokeswoman, encouraged a competition between them for the right to build more of the 16 buildings still to come.[2]  First to complete, wins.

By August, the tower closest to my building was rising fast. That month, the project’s structural engineer, Ysrael Seinuk, tested concrete from 22 trucks lined up outside the site. He rejected five of them, concrete he judged too weak to support a 46-story tower. He notified the general contractor, HRH Construction, whose own project manager had separately flagged the same batch as weak.[3]  The subcontractor supplying the concrete, Laquila Pinnacle, poured it anyway.  According to the reporting, Laquila proceeded at its own risk on the expectation that concrete testing weak early on would still cure to strength over time. Trump himself later put it plainly: Laquila had the right to pour, but if the results came back bad, they would have to rip it out and pour again.[4]

The results came back bad. Testing at 28 days showed the concrete had reached less than half the strength the plans required.[5]

Work did not stop. The tower continued rising, floor by floor, to 19 stories. It was a routine safety inspection prompted by complaints from construction workers that finally caught the problem. A city inspector issued a stop-work order on the spot.[6]  The repair required jackhammering out and reinforcing the concrete around as many as 50 of the 80 columns holding up the building’s fifth floor.[7]

Work stopped.

One detail at the time is easy to skim past, and it matters more than it looks. The city had recently begun allowing architects and engineers to certify elements of construction work themselves, in place of city inspectors, specifically to move projects through the permitting process faster.[8]  It was a small administrative choice made in the name of efficiency. It is the same choice, in different clothing, that appears again in both of this year’s episodes.  Efficiency, it turns out, is not free. Someone pays for it, later, and rarely the person who chose it.

In 2026, no Trump, same result

The building at the center of the 2026 case has nothing to do with Trump.  It is the former Pfizer headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street, a 37-story tower being converted by the developer MetroLoft into what was meant to be the largest office-to-residential conversion in New York City. Construction began in 2024. The conversion was planned to create 1,602 apartments and included a vertical addition of more than a dozen floors above the existing structure.[9] That distinction from Riverside South, as new construction, matters. The Pfizer building was already standing. It was now being asked to carry weight that was never originally intended.

On the morning of July 7, 2026, two columns on the 21st floor buckled, forcing an evacuation that shut down a stretch of Manhattan from 40th to 45th Street for nearly three weeks.[10]

A Times investigation found the steel reinforcement plates required by the structural plans were never installed on the two columns that buckled, or on four others nearby.[11]  Weeks later, documents obtained through a records request showed eight more columns with missing or undersized plates, scattered across three additional floors.[12]  Daniel Linzell, a structural engineer at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who reviewed the drawings, called it plainly a “lack of oversight.”[13]

Nearly 30 years and a different developer separate this building from Riverside South.  In 1997, a warning was issued in real time and overridden. In 2026, the required reinforcement appears simply not to have been installed, certified anyway, and caught only after a structural failure forced the city’s hand and a newspaper’s records request forced the rest into view. The mechanism from 1997 is intact. Oversight was privatized in the name of efficiency, and the private party doing the certifying answered to the people paying for the building, not to the public standing beneath it.[14]

This summer, in Washington, the same mechanism, faster still

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has no structural columns and no residential units, and it may seem like an odd third entry beside two Manhattan towers. But the mechanism is the same.

In the spring of 2026, the National Park Service began draining and cleaning the pool ahead of the America 250 celebrations planned for July 4. The Trump administration went further than routine maintenance, ordering a full renovation that included a new liner painted, memorably, in an intense blue. The contract went to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a company that had previously worked on Trump properties, without competitive bidding, for a job that would balloon well past its original estimate.[15] The coating had already begun to peel and separate in June. The work was declared finished for the Fourth of July, as Trump had demanded. Algae bloomed. The water turned a bright, acid green.[16]

The administration’s first public explanation was not that the work had failed. It was vandalism, a claim serious enough to produce a felony indictment.[17] The Justice Department’s own later filing undercut it, attributing the damage instead to “a botched installation,” brought on by bad weather and delays in getting the sealing product, against a deadline that would not move.[18] The charges were dropped.[19]

The same structure runs through all three episodes now. A hard deadline, set for reasons that had nothing to do with the work itself. A failure that became visible to the public only when officials could no longer maintain a more convenient story.

What I understand now that I didn’t then

Thirty years ago, I watched the Riverside South towers rise from my windows on West End Avenue and understood that something had been cut short to keep the pace up. I talked about it at the time with people in the real estate community, and I asked how many other buildings had made the same trade without anyone catching it. What I did not do was write about it until now.

The question I was asking in 1997 turned out not to be rhetorical. In June 2021, Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, collapsed killing 98 people as they slept. The investigations that followed found structural problems that had been documented for years and never adequately addressed.  20 Riverside South was caught before anyone was hurt. Surfside was not caught at all.

That is what makes the Pfizer building alarming in a way that the Reflecting Pool, for all its absurdity, is not.  A pool’s failed coating is costly and embarrassing.  A structural column’s failure can be deadly.

Physics does not negotiate with a decision to keep going. It simply waits, and eventually it presents the result, sometimes to a column, sometimes to a pool liner, and once, in Florida, to 98 families. That is the whole of what physics catches that politics doesn’t: not a moral, just an accounting, rendered later, whether or not anyone wanted to hear it.

Endnotes

[1] James Glanz and Simon Ducroquet, “More Columns Lacked Support in Troubled N.Y.C. Building, Documents Show,” The New York Times, Aug. 28, 2026.

[2] Charles V. Bagli, “Weak Concrete Stops Work on West Side Trump Project,” The New York Times, Nov. 3, 1997.

[3] Charles V. Bagli, “Trump Project Went On Despite Warning About Concrete,” The New York Times, Nov. 4, 1997.

[4] Bagli, “Trump Project Went On Despite Warning About Concrete,” Nov. 4, 1997.

[5] Bagli, “Weak Concrete Stops Work on West Side Trump Project,” Nov. 3, 1997.

[6] Bagli, “Weak Concrete Stops Work on West Side Trump Project,” Nov. 3, 1997.

[7] Bagli, “Trump Project Went On Despite Warning About Concrete,” Nov. 4, 1997.

[8] Bagli, “Weak Concrete Stops Work on West Side Trump Project,” Nov. 3, 1997.

[9] Stefanos Chen, Dionne Searcey, Asmaa Elkeurti and Mihir Zaveri, “Inspector of Buckling Building Cited for Missing Problems at Other Sites,” The New York Times, July 9, 2026.

[10] Chen et al., “Inspector of Buckling Building Cited for Missing Problems at Other Sites,” July 9, 2026.

[11] Glanz and Ducroquet, “More Columns Lacked Support in Troubled N.Y.C. Building, Documents Show,” Aug. 28, 2026.

[12] Glanz and Ducroquet, “More Columns Lacked Support in Troubled N.Y.C. Building, Documents Show,” Aug. 28, 2026.

[13] Glanz and Ducroquet, “More Columns Lacked Support in Troubled N.Y.C. Building, Documents Show,” Aug. 28, 2026.

[14] Chen et al., “Inspector of Buckling Building Cited for Missing Problems at Other Sites,” July 9, 2026.

[15] Raquel Coronell Uribe, “Interior secretary says Trump administration will use the same company to repair Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool damage,” NBC News, July 5, 2026.

[16] Aishvarya Kavi, “The Reflecting Pool Appears to Be Rejecting Its Makeover,” The New York Times, June 19, 2026, updated June 22, 2026.

[17] Coronell Uribe, “Interior secretary says Trump administration will use the same company to repair Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool damage,” July 5, 2026.

[18] Ryan J. Reilly, “Trump administration drops Reflecting Pool case, blaming damage on ‘botched’ installation,” NBC News, July 31, 2026.

[19] Reilly, “Trump administration drops Reflecting Pool case, blaming damage on ‘botched’ installation,” July 31, 2026; “Ripple effects: Three people have Reflecting Pool charges dropped after Hearn request,” NPR, Aug. 3, 2026.

[20] National Institute of Standards and Technology, “NIST Releases Technical Findings on What Caused the 2021 Partial Collapse of Champlain Towers South,” June 22, 2026. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2026/06/nist-releases-technical-findings-what-caused-2021-partial-collapse.