MANHATTAN ALERT! The Skyscraper's FATAL ERROR That's Tearing Itself Apart

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Right now, somewhere above 57th Street in Manhattan, there is a crack. Not a hairline. Not a settlement fracture.

[00:00:08]>> [music] >> A crack 10 in deep inside the reinforced concrete spine of the [music] tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere.

[00:00:16]432 Park Avenue. 1,396 ft of concrete and glass held up by a core that engineers say is compromised.

[00:00:27]1,893 documented defects.

[00:00:31]A penthouse that sold [music] for 87.7 million dollars cannot find a buyer at 15 million dollars.

[00:00:38]And the man who built it, his own partner foreclosed on him.

[00:00:43]This is how the most expensive residential building ever constructed in New York City cracked open from the inside. [music] To understand why this building is failing, you need to understand what it was designed to do.

[00:00:55]432 Park Avenue is 93 ft wide at the base >> [music] >> and 1,396 ft tall. That is a height-to-width ratio [music] of 15 to 1.

[00:01:06]When it topped out, it was the most slender supertall building on the planet.

[00:01:11]Picture a number two pencil balanced on its eraser, and then imagine the wind blowing.

[00:01:16]That is the aspect ratio they chose to build on one of the windiest corridors in Manhattan.

[00:01:22]The architect [music] was Rafael Viñoly.

[00:01:25]The structural engineer was WSP Cantor Seinuk. The developer was Harry Macklowe >> [music] >> in partnership with the Los Angeles-based CIM Group. Macklowe called it the building of the 21st century. And on paper, [music] the engineering was supposed to make that true. 96 stories, >> [music] >> 84 numbered residential floors.

[00:01:47]White Portland cement was chosen specifically for its color.

[00:01:51]They poured 70,000 cubic yards of concrete, 12,500 tons of rebar.

[00:01:57]The lower 38 floors used concrete rated at 14,000 lb per square inch, strong enough to hold up a small mountain.

[00:02:05]The upper floors used concrete rated at 10,000 lb per square inch.

[00:02:11]The water to cement ratio was held at 0.25 on every single pour, every single floor, all the way up.

[00:02:19]At the center of it all was a 30-ft [music] square reinforced concrete core with walls 30 in thick.

[00:02:27]That core [music] is the spine.

[00:02:29]It carries the wind loads. It resists the lateral forces.

[00:02:33]>> [music] >> It is the one element in the entire structure you cannot afford to compromise.

[00:02:39]To fight vortex shedding, the phenomenon where wind curls around a slender tower and sets it oscillating sideways, not in the direction of the wind, but perpendicular to it, engineers punched five two-story open mechanical floors into the facade.

[00:02:55]Wind blows straight through them, like holes in a sail.

[00:03:00]Those gaps disrupt the organized vortex street before it can build into a destructive rhythm.

[00:03:06]They installed outrigger trusses at each of those mechanical floors, spanning two full stories [music] and tying the central core to the perimeter columns.

[00:03:15]They wrapped the tower in a sheer frame grid of white concrete columns at 15 [music] and 1/2-ft spacing.

[00:03:22]They drove roughly 60 rock anchors 60 to 70 ft down into Manhattan bedrock.

[00:03:28]And at the very top, between floors 86 and 89, they hung two 660-ton opposed pendulum [music] tuned mass dampers, counterweights designed to swing against the building's motion and cancel it out.

[00:03:42]Five systems working in concert to cheat the wind.

[00:03:46]On paper, it was genius.

[00:03:49]But within 2 years of the first residents moving in, every single one of those systems would be tested, and the building would start failing in ways none of them were designed to prevent.

[00:03:59]>> [music] >> The first sales closed in 2015 and 2016.

[00:04:05]The median price at first sale was $18.4 million. The The Saudi retail billionaire Fawaz Alhokair paid $87.7 million for the 96th floor penthouse.

[00:04:19]Thomas Peterffy, the founder of Interactive Brokers, took the 84th floor.

[00:04:23]>> [music] >> Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez moved in by 2018.

[00:04:29]For a brief window, it looked like Macklowe had been right.

[00:04:33]>> [music] >> 10 of 13 early buyers who flipped between 2017 and 2018 walked away with profits.

[00:04:42]And then the timeline starts ticking.

[00:04:44]November 5th, 2017, a catastrophic water flood ripped through the building between floors 83 and 86.

[00:04:53]A unit owner who had paid 46 and a quarter million dollars sued to recover his deposit. November 22nd, 2018, a flange burst on the 60th floor.

[00:05:06]4 days later, November 26th, a pipe failed on the 74th.

[00:05:11]>> [music] >> Two of four residential elevator shafts flooded.

[00:05:15]Total water damage in 2018 alone reached $9.7 million.

[00:05:20]35 apartments were damaged by leaks.

[00:05:24]An elevator outage lasted weeks.

[00:05:26]Insurance premiums on the building rose 300% in 2 years.

[00:05:31]This was damage.

[00:05:33]Then Halloween night, 2019, wind picked up over Manhattan. A resident stepped into one of the building's elevators.

[00:05:42]The cab slowed as designed in high wind, then it stopped.

[00:05:47]That resident sat inside that elevator car, somewhere in the sky above 57th Street, for 1 hour and 25 minutes.

[00:05:57]June, 2021.

[00:06:00]An electrical explosion, the second in 3 years.

[00:06:05]Each of these events was treated as an isolated incident. A pipe here, an elevator there.

[00:06:11]But here is what nobody told you.

[00:06:13]They were not isolated. They were symptoms of a building that was never finished to specification.

[00:06:20]And the people in charge had been warned.

[00:06:23]By 2019, residents were holding owners meetings, and the meeting notes had begun to read like dispatches from a haunted ship.

[00:06:32]Creaking, banging, clicking.

[00:06:36]The pipes inside the walls vibrated so violently during high wind events that bathtubs were effectively unusable.

[00:06:45]Metal partitions groaned.

[00:06:47]There was a whistle in the doorways and the elevator shafts that residents described as constant and unnerving.

[00:06:55]And then, there was the trash chute.

[00:06:59]432 Park Avenue's trash chute is a straight 1,300 ft vertical drop with no breaks and no offsets.

[00:07:09]A bag of trash thrown in on the 80th floor accelerates the entire way down.

[00:07:14]By the time it hits bottom, it is approaching terminal velocity.

[00:07:19]Residents reported the impact vibrating through the walls of their bedrooms.

[00:07:25]Board meeting notes describe it as a bomb going off inside the building on a schedule.

[00:07:30]Every single time someone took out the garbage.

[00:07:34]Serena Abramović paid $17 million for her unit in 2016. [music] She told the New York Times she had been convinced it would be the best building in New York.

[00:07:47]She said everyone in the building hated each other.

[00:07:51]She said if she had known then what she knew now, she never would have bought.

[00:07:56]And she said something that captures the entire disaster in a single sentence.

[00:08:01]Everything here was camouflage.

[00:08:04]The private members restaurant that was supposed to be a luxury amenity cost each household $1,200 a year when it opened in 2015.

[00:08:14]By 2020, it was 15,000.

[00:08:17]Stay with me >> [music] >> because what comes next is worse.

[00:08:22]The developers had been warned by their own engineers.

[00:08:27]According to the April 2025 complaint filed in the New York Supreme Court, engineers advised Macklowe to apply a protective elastomeric coating to the building's facade.

[00:08:39]Elastomeric coating is a flexible waterproof membrane designed to keep moisture from penetrating concrete [music] and reaching the steel reinforcement inside.

[00:08:50]If water gets in, the steel corrodes.

[00:08:53]When steel corrodes, it expands. When it expands, it cracks the concrete from the inside out.

[00:08:59]>> [music] >> The engineers knew this. They told the developer exactly what needed to happen.

[00:09:05]Macklowe [music] refused. According to the complaint, applying the coating would significantly alter the building's appearance and reduce its appeal to the world's billionaires.

[00:09:15]He chose the look of the building over the life of the building.

[00:09:19]So instead of the engineered solution, the developer applied a clear silicone sealant.

[00:09:24]The same material you would use to waterproof a yacht.

[00:09:28]Water got in anyway.

[00:09:30]The April 2025 complaint alleges that steel reinforcement is now corroding inside the concrete columns. That water has been seeping into the structural core for years, and somewhere inside that core, the 30-in thick reinforced concrete spine that holds up all 1,396 ft of this building has developed a crack 10-in deep.

[00:09:52]The complaint also alleges that 73% of the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems inside the building were not built to specification.

[00:10:01]Not a handful of items missed. Not a few corners cut on a punch list. 73%.

[00:10:08]This was not bad luck. This was not an act of nature. This was a choice.

[00:10:13]A choice to protect aesthetics over structure.

[00:10:17]A choice to seal a skyscraper with yacht polish and hope the wind and the rain would not find a way in.

[00:10:23]The engineers knew.

[00:10:25]And they said nothing publicly for years.

[00:10:29]Now, look at the numbers.

[00:10:31]432 Park Avenue was briefly the first building in New York City history to cross $2 billion in condominium sales.

[00:10:40]Total project cost reached $3.1 billion.

[00:10:45]Right now, the numbers are running hard in the other direction.

[00:10:49]Thomas Peterffy sold the unit on the 84th [music] floor in 2024 for $13.5 million.

[00:10:57]>> [music] >> That is a 40% loss from what he paid.

[00:11:02]The unit on the 79th floor, originally listed at $135 million, was cut to $92 million in May 2023, and finally sold that October for $65.6 million.

[00:11:18]Fawaz Alhokair listed his $87.7 million penthouse for $169 million in June 2021.

[00:11:28]By May 2024, the asking [music] price had been slashed to $15 million.

[00:11:35]It is still unsold.

[00:11:38]An estimated $100 million is now [music] needed just to refurbish the tuned mass dampers at the top of the building.

[00:11:46]Those dampers are supposed to keep the tower from swaying itself apart. [music] CIM Group, Macklowe's co-developer, foreclosed on Macklowe's three personal units inside the tower.

[00:11:58]The man who called it the building of the 21st century lost his own apartments [music] in it.

[00:12:03]Rafael Viñoly, the architect who designed the tower's iconic silhouette, died in March 2023 before the worst of it came out in court.

[00:12:13]And right now, as attorneys prepare for the next phase of litigation, >> [music] >> one question sits at the center of every engineering report filed in this case.

[00:12:22]A question about that 10-in crack [music] in the core that nobody has publicly answered yet.

[00:12:28]The April 2025 complaint [music] runs 46 pages. It catalogs 1,893 defects. It describes water infiltration into structural columns, corroding steel inside the concrete, and a core crack deep enough to fit your fist.

[00:12:47]The lawsuit seeks $165 million in damages.

[00:12:52]Plaintiff's counsel told reporters, "This [music] matter extends beyond negligence," calling it an alleged calculated scheme driven by greed that eroded trust.

[00:13:03]CIM Group says they vehemently deny the claims and will move to dismiss the complaint.

[00:13:11]Meanwhile, the building is still occupied.

[00:13:14]Families are still living inside it.

[00:13:17]The dampers at the top still need $100 million in work that has not started.

[00:13:25]The crack in the core has not been publicly explained or repaired.

[00:13:29]No independent engineer has been allowed to publish a full assessment of what that crack means for the building's long-term ability to resist wind loads.

[00:13:39]The wind still hits the tower every single day. And every single day, the spine of the building is asked to absorb forces [music] it was designed to handle only when fully intact.

[00:13:54]They built [music] the tallest residential tower in the western hemisphere.

[00:13:58]The slenderest supertall ever constructed. [music] A building that crossed $2 in sales before the first lawsuit was even filed.

[00:14:08]And right now, 1,396 ft above Billionaires' Row, there is a crack [music] in the only thing holding it all together.

[00:14:18]And no one has told the public what happens if it gets worse.