New York City regulations in the wake of The Pfizer Building - by Joe DiPompeo

For a few days in July, a lot of us in this industry, as well as the world, were watching the same building.

At 235 East 42^nd St., the former Pfizer headquarters undergoing conversion to residential, steel columns buckled and upper floors dropped. Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) and the Department of Buildings responded, shoring was installed, a collapse zone was drawn across a wide swath of Midtown, nine adjacent buildings were evacuated and Second Ave. was closed. The building was ultimately stabilized and, remarkably, nobody was hurt. The investigation is ongoing and I’m not going to speculate on cause here — that’s what investigations are for.

If a building of that size had come down, the damage would not have stopped at the property line. Adjacent structures would have been struck. The street and sidewalk would have been destroyed, along with the water, gas, sewer, electrical and telecom infrastructure beneath them, and also possible damage to transit tunnels as well. Anyone within the radius — pedestrians, transit riders, first responders, occupants of neighboring buildings who had no connection whatsoever to the project — would have been at risk of serious injury or death. 

And that is roughly the setup on almost every block in Manhattan. Tall buildings, party walls, tight lot lines, dense sidewalks, subways underneath, and no meaningful buffer between a structural problem and the public.

My politics lean libertarian. My instinct on most questions is that there is too much regulation. I run a firm. When owners, architects, engineers and property managers complain about the sheer volume of compliance work in New York City, I’m not rolling my eyes. I’m nodding.

But on this one, I go the other way.

The reason New York has some of the most stringent building regulations in the country is not that its bureaucrats are more ambitious than everyone else’s. It’s density and consequence. A brick falling from a farmhouse façade in Kansas is a maintenance item. You notice it, you fix it, nothing else happens. A brick coming off a façade 20-stories above a crowded Manhattan sidewalk is a fatality. Same defect, same physics, entirely different outcome — and the difference is not the wall, it’s what’s underneath it.

That asymmetry is the whole justification. Façade Inspection Safety Program (FISP), parapet observations, Periodic Inspection of Parking Structures (PIPS) for parking structures, the special inspection regime, the filing and sign-off requirements, the local laws — nearly all of it traces back to a specific incident. These rules were written in response to real failures, not invented in a vacuum. They are, in the most literal sense, a record of things that went wrong and what it took to keep them from going wrong again.

This does not mean that we cannot simplify, streamline, and improve both regulations and the administration of them. There is real room for simplification, better technology and clearer guidance — and the industry should keep pushing hard for all of it.

But simplifying how we comply is a different argument from whether we should have to. On the substance, New York gets this right. The city’s built environment concentrates risk in a way most of the country simply does not, and the regulatory burden is the price of that density. It’s not paperwork. It’s the mechanism by which a defect gets caught while it’s still a repair rather than a headline.

The events of last month were a reminder of the size of the downside and should be a reminder when we wonder why we have such complex requirements. 

If you need help complying — PIPS inspections for parking structures, FISP façade cycles, parapet observations, condition assessments, structural repair design, new building or any other structural engineering need — reach out to Structural Workshop. It’s what we do.

Joe DiPompeo, PE, F.SEI, F.ASCE is president of Structural Workshop, LLC, Mountain Lakes, N.J.