How a Student’s Phone Call Averted a Skyscraper Collapse: The Tale of the Citicorp Center

The Cit­i­group Cen­ter in Mid­town Man­hat­tan is also known by its address, 601 Lex­ing­ton Avenue, at which it’s been stand­ing for 47 years, longer than the medi­an New York­er has been alive. Though still a fair­ly hand­some build­ing, in a sev­en­ties-cor­po­rate sort of way, it now pops out only mild­ly on the sky­line. At street lev­el, though, the build­ing con­tin­ues to turn heads, placed as it is on a series of stilt-look­ing columns placed not at the cor­ners, but in the mid­dle of the walls. A vis­i­tor with no knowl­edge of struc­tur­al engi­neer­ing pass­ing the Cit­i­group Cen­ter for the first time may won­der why it does­n’t fall down — which, for a few months in 1978, was a gen­uine­ly seri­ous con­cern.

This sto­ry, told with a spe­cial explana­to­ry vivid­ness in the new Ver­i­ta­si­um video above, usu­al­ly begins with a phone call. An uniden­ti­fied archi­tec­ture stu­dent got ahold of William LeMes­suri­er, the struc­tur­al engi­neer of the Citi­corp Cen­ter, as it was then known, to relay con­cerns he’d heard a pro­fes­sor express about the still-new sky­scrap­er’s abil­i­ty to with­stand “quar­ter­ing winds,” which blow diag­o­nal­ly at its cor­ners. LeMes­suri­er took the time to walk the stu­dent through the ele­ments of his then-ground­break­ing light­weight design, which includ­ed chevron-shaped braces that direct­ed ten­sion loads down to the columns and a 400-ton con­crete tuned mass damper (or “great block of cheese,” as it got to be called) meant to coun­ter­act oscil­la­tion move­ments.

LeMes­suri­er was a proud pro­fes­sion­al, but his pro­fes­sion­al­ism out­weighed his pride. When he went back to check the Citi­corp Cen­ter’s plans, he received an unpleas­ant sur­prise: the con­struc­tion com­pa­ny had swapped out the weld­ed joints in those chevron braces for cheap­er bolt­ed ones. His office had approved the change, which made sense at the time, and had also tak­en into account only per­pen­dic­u­lar winds, not quar­ter­ing winds, as was then stan­dard indus­try prac­tice. Per­form­ing the rel­e­vant cal­cu­la­tions him­self, he deter­mined that the whole tow­er could be brought down — and much in the sur­round­ing area destroyed with it — by the kind of winds that have a one-in-six­teen chance of blow­ing in any giv­en year.

It did­n’t take LeMes­suri­er long to real­ize that he had no choice but to reveal what he’d dis­cov­ered to Citi­corp, whose lead­er­ship coop­er­at­ed with the accel­er­at­ed, semi-clan­des­tine project of shoring up their gleam­ing emblem’s struc­tur­al joints by night. The work could hard­ly fail to draw the atten­tion of the New York press, of course, but it received scant cov­er­age thanks to an impec­ca­bly timed news­pa­per strike, and on its com­ple­tion made the sky­scraper per­haps the safest in the city. In fact, the sto­ry of the Citi­corp Cen­ter dis­as­ter that was­n’t only came out pub­licly in a 1995 New York­er piece by Joseph Mor­gen­stern, which made LeMes­suri­er a kind of hero among struc­tur­al engi­neers. But it was the stu­dents who’d iden­ti­fied the build­ing’s faults, not just one but two of whom came for­ward there­after, who per­son­i­fied the life-sav­ing pow­er of ask­ing the right ques­tions.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How This Chica­go Sky­scraper Bare­ly Touch­es the Ground

New York’s Lost Sky­scraper: The Rise and Fall of the Singer Tow­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


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  • Chaddy P says:

    Love this sto­ry. Mis­takes were made. When dis­cov­ered, they were cor­rect­ed. Now we have a great sto­ry of a crises avert­ed. Obvi­ous­ly dis­as­ters are much bet­ter news than dis­as­ters pre­vent­ed so this will not go viral but a big thumbs up to the stu­dents and the archi­tect who lis­tened to them (and the cor­po­ra­tion who also paid atten­tion). It takes a vil­lage to keep a cool thing going.

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