There's a big problem in The Big Apple. And it’s not the only city facing this dilemma.
You’ve heard of Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa and you can’t forget San Francisco’s tilting
Millennium Tower. But did you know that New York City also has its very own slanted skyscraper?
That’s right, the skyline that never stops evolving has developed a bit of a predicament.
This is One Seaport or 161 Maiden Lane. 60 storeys of prime real estate on Manhattan’s eastern
waterfront… at first glance it may look like any other construction project downtown. But look a
lot closer, and you’ll find it’s actually leaning 8 centimetres, or three inches, to the north.
Now that might not seem like a lot, but it’s enough to leave a brand new skyscraper abandoned
before it’s even opened. Construction is in a stalemate and no one wants to admit fault.
"It was supposed to have beautiful south and east facing views,
and it's turned into one of those symbols of like what can go wrong in a project,"
With a busy highway on one side, a city packed full of high-rises and busy New Yorkers on the
other, intense media scrutiny and millions of dollars in real estate deals at stake,
the pressure is on to fix the tower before it’s too late.
So what exactly caused it to lean? And will it ever stand up straight again?
It’s no secret that New York City’s real estate is both expensive and competitive.
When it’s parkside or waterfront - the price tags, and prestige, get even higher.
161 Maiden Lane was going to be no exception. Overlooking the East River in downtown Manhattan
– the 204 metre tower was set to be the tallest residential skyscraper on the eastern waterfront
with apartment sales range from $1M to $7M. But after several construction delays and
accidents, it’s safe to say that the skyscraper has had a string of well...bad luck.
Today, construction is stalled and the building only has about half of its
windows and finishings – so it’s a bit of a blemish on the New York skyline.
There have been issues throughout its entire development, but it’s the
allegations around the most important step of construction that are generating the most
interest – the building’s foundation. Now for any non-engineers out there,
that’s the part of a skyscraper that sits at and below ground level, and provides
a firm base for it to rise on. Essentially before you build up … you gotta build down.
But assembling a skyscraper in New York City is unlike anywhere else.
"Because you're you're developing in such a hyper dense environment, there are certain
constraints you have that you wouldn't have in, let's say, Dallas, where you have a lot
of land to play with Here you're building it's all vertical engineering." But assembling a skyscraper
in New York City is unlike anywhere else. "Because you're developing in such a hyper dense
environment, there are certain constraints you have that you wouldn't have in, let's say, Dallas,
where you have a lot of land to play with. Here you're building, it's all vertical engineering."
Now, all that vertical engineering takes time, expertise and of course, money.
To make something like this worth it, developers need to make sure the tower can bring in more
money than they used to build it. Of course, that was expected to come
from luxury apartment sales. And the current economic crisis
has left people looking for places to invest. In 2022 alone, stocks were down over 18%, bonds
were down 13%, and real estate was down 26%. One survey found that Americans making over
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Now to really understand the allegations around this building’s foundations we need
to get you up to speed on a few things – so buckle-up for another
little round of Engineering 101 with The B1M. Foundations are complicated and we’re going to
massively simplify here. Please don’t go building your own foundations off the back of this video.
The basic job of a foundation is to provide a firm base for a building to stand on and to
transfer the vertical weight or load of that building down onto planet Earth.Sometimes
that can be done onto great, strong rock or soil at ground level. Sometimes you have to
go a little deeper. And sometimes you have to go very deep indeed. Every construction
site in the world is unique, so things vary. Small buildings like homes might use block or
strip footings – that’s basically just shallow cubes of strips of concrete – with a slab on top.
Other small structures may use raft foundations. And very big buildings often use a form of
piling – that’s where steel-reinforced concrete columns are driven or poured into the ground
to reach good material or bedrock deep below, transferring the weight of the building down.
Sometimes that’s done with a basement where the piles are used to form the
walls. Sometimes there are piles that go beyond a basement, sometimes there
are pools or whole subway stations down there, but you get the idea. Like we said, not easy.
Now in major cities with lots of tall buildings around – kind of like New York – you can’t just
go digging a hole wherever you like. With all those heavy buildings putting
pressure on the ground any excavation would take away some of the earth their weight is
resting on – it would interrupt their so-called angle of incidence. To avoid
the risk of buildings collapsing teams digging basements need to create retaining walls first.
That can be done by driving sheets of steel into the ground or creating a wall of piles first,
then excavating, bracing the open hole as you go. Now we could bore you with a bit of top-down
basement construction but we’ve done that before and it’s not really relevant.
The main thing to take away from all of this as you’ve hopefully gathered is that
foundation engineering is governed by one very important material: soil.
"Soil has a bearing capacity. That is referring to how much poundage a foundation can handle.
First that soil gets tested. Definitely they have a parking lot or something and they dug down into the ground and they have tested the soil
Then the engineer that has designed a building is considering the weight of the building,
is considering the weight of the furniture and weight of the people, weight of the
glass. Also weird forces like wind force." If a soil is too weak or not up to standard,
it can be treated to improve its strength sometimes by adding chemicals or by mixing in
other material. But the more common approach is just to go for the more expensive but
often much more reliable piles. At 161 Maiden Lane, Pizzarotti,
the building's contractor, sued the developer, Fortis Property Group, saying it cut corners.
According to the lawsuit, they took the soil improvement route, rather than the piling route
like many other nearby buildings. Pizarotti claims details of the method used were not revealed
to it before it started building the tower. As construction continued, this allegedly made the
building improperly settle and caused it to tilt roughly 8 centimetres. There’s been a lot of legal
drama over who is ultimately to blame, and the case is still being battled out in the courtroom.
Pizzarotti claims the building will continue to lean if the foundation isn’t fixed – which
could create a risk of falling facade panels, corrosion, or even elevators failing to remain
vertical. As a result, the company claims it terminated its contract with Fortis.
Fortis acknowledged the building had an ‘alignment issue’, but said it wasn’t a
cause for safety concerns. The company also said Pizarotti never actually terminated its
contract and instead continued working. We reached out to both parties for
comment on all this but didn’t get a response. "If the lean was caused by a force that came
from the wind. It was acting on a skeleton. Empty. And it was able to push it that way.
The moment you put glass on that? You have a ship sail. More force from that wind
and it will move further. And if you have something broken, especially in the case
of concrete, concrete breaks, it's done." This could explain why there were reports
that some of the glass facade had appeared to be removed in 2020.
While that could be a temporary fix, a long term plan still hasn’t been laid
out largely because the case is still being fought-out in court.
"The leaning of the building is a symptom of the problem. If you don't know the problem, you cannot
give a remedy for it. If the problem is a broken foundation, you're done. You have to dismantle
every fixed about foundation and go for it. If the problem could be something much simpler,
that maybe the foundation has no issues." Over in San Francisco, engineers have
proposed fixing Millennium Tower’s lean with underpinning; installing 18
new piles into the building’s foundation deep underground. Now underpinning is a very common
procedure – especially on domestic properties – but it’s extremely challenging on a skyscraper.
Fortis claims all it would take to fix 161 Maiden Lane is a simple redesign of the glass facade,
but until we know the root of the problem we won’t really be
able to work out the best way to fix it. To be very clear – and especially for those
nearby – no one is claiming that the building is on the verge of collapsing right now and
it’s understood to be in a safe condition. But the longer it sits abandoned, the more
expensive it gets – and nobody wants to foot that bill. According to The Real Deal, nearly
all prospective buyers have pulled out of their deals. And hundreds of millions of dollars have
already been sunk into the construction work. It remains to be seen if this leaning tower can
ever stand straight again. In the meantime it sits unfinished on the city’s skyline.
For all of the drama of this building, countless other projects around the world
proceed without any issues everyday. It’s a powerful reminder of just how important
the construction industry’s work really is – and how billions of us take it for granted.
This video was brought to you by Masterworks. You can learn more about that at the link in the description.
There's also the chance to dive deeper on this and the other topics on our channel
over on The World’s Best Construction Podcast – available now wherever you get
your podcasts. And as always, if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the
definitive video channel for construction, make sure you’re subscribed to The B1M.