The Citicorp Tower has been a Manhattan skyline icon for almost a half-century with a glimmering silhouette and distinctive, prism-topped roof.
The 54-story skyscraper was devoted on Oct 12, 1977, by Gov. Hugh Carey and Mayor Abe Beame. Lower than a yr later, chief engineer William LeMessurier discovered it had a 1 in 16 likelihood of toppling over in hurricane winds.
The invention set off a frantic effort to put it aside with out letting the general public know — with the summer time hurricane season quick approaching.
It was “one of the greatest engineering crises in history,” Michael M. Greenburg, the creator of “The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower” (NYU Press/Washington Mews; out Tuesday), instructed The Put up.
“I was immediately drawn to LeMessurier’s story — the moral aspect of it, the dichotomy between heroism and cover-up.”
LeMessurier, who was busy on many different tasks, knew he hadn’t paid sufficient consideration to Citicorp after he turned it over to a staff of engineers. He needed to resolve between alerting Stubbins and Citibank chairman Walter Wriston to his errors — thus jeopardizing his popularity and profession — or remaining silent and praying the worst wouldn’t occur.
Though LeMessurier in the end got here to the rescue in time, his legacy is tainted, Greenburg writes, by his “failure to provide adequate direction and oversight … in the development of the Citicorp Center engineering drawings, calculations and revisions.”
Greenburg weaves a compelling, thriller-like narrative. The 1977 blackout plunged the metropolis into darkness and rioting. Town had barely averted chapter and firms have been fleeing for the suburbs.
The exception was Citibank. Wriston needed to create a signature skyscraper on Manhattan’s East Aspect. He secretly assembled a big web site between Lexington and Third Avenue, between East 53rd and 54th.
One problem remained: St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, on the nook of Lexington Avenue and East 54th Road, which was additionally a cultural heart and jazz mecca.
The church agreed to promote its land to Citibank for $9 million underneath strict situations: The financial institution would construct a brand new church construction “physically separate” from the workplace tower. Furthermore, the “air space above approximately two-thirds of the footprint of the new church would remain open” and “no element of the tower would encroach on or interfere with the church building below.”
To design the tower across the church, Stubbins and LeMessurier envisioned a “skyscraper on stilts.” Somewhat than place help columns at its 4 corners, they’d stand underneath every of the constructing’s center faces with the tower cantilevered above a public plaza.
That posed an engineering problem. To stabilize the construction, LeMessurier devised a community of triangular, V-shaped inside braces that have been to be welded collectively to stabilize the constructing.
However quickly after the tower opened in October 1977, the engineer realized he had inadequately accounted for the potential impact of robust winds. Though the tower would stand up to 100-mph blasts on any of its faces, a “quartering wind” — one which struck at an angle, thus impacting two faces on the identical time — was rather more harmful.
When LeMessurier reviewed the stabilizing methods his staff had used, he discovered — a lot to his dismay — that the braces had been cheaply bolted collectively, not welded as known as for within the authentic plan.
He shared the grim information with Stubbins, bankers and metropolis officers. The Pink Cross was tapped to secretly put together an evacuation plan within the occasion the tower was near toppling.
As one tropical storm after one other appeared set to bear down on New York, all arms agreed that solely a crash undertaking to weld the braces on all 54 flooring may save the tower — stuffed with 1000’s of staff unaware of the peril — from attainable disaster.
The night time supervisor of the close by Waldorf-Astoria Lodge, a cousin of one in every of LeMessurier’s staff, arrange a “war room” for LeMessurier’s staff in Frank Sinatra’s personal suite the place they devised a complete retrofitting of Citicorp’s structural bracing.
Greenburg writes that, each night time for 2 months, “a slew of over twenty face-armored union welders” loaded tools by means of loading docks and “ascended service elevators sans the probing gaze of New York’s major newspapers,” which have been conveniently on strike.
The work was completed by the top of October. Finally, LeMessurier “could breathe again,” the creator notes.
Nonetheless, Greenburg, who by no means met the engineer, notes that he remained haunted till his dying in 2007.
The Citicorp Tower, he writes, “born of courage and design brilliance, forever bears the mark of an audacious and all-too-human engineer and his willingness to risk all.”
