The Skyscraper That Could Have Toppled in the Wind

A secret operation to save an office building, from 1995. View in browser | Update your preferences City Perils The Skyscraper That Could Have Toppled Over in the Wind What’s an engineer’s worst nightmare? To realize that the supports he designed for a tower like Citicorp Center are flawed—and hurricane season is approaching. By Joseph Morgenstern In the summer of 1978, a structural engineer named William J. LeMessurier made perhaps the scariest possible discovery for a member of his field: one of the buildings he had designed—a skyscraper already standing in midtown Manhattan—was in danger of falling over. The revelation followed a quizzical phone call from a student writing about the building; later, LeMessurier’s own calculations showed that the structure—the brand-new Citicorp tower, then the seventh-tallest building in the world—could be toppled by a strong wind. Seventeen years later, The New Yorker published the first significant reporting about the potential catastrophe. The piece examined how an expert such as LeMessurier could have made such a staggering error, and the largely secret operation to fix the building—all while Citicorp employees continued to work inside. For the structural engineer responsible for the tower, the situation was both a public-safety crisis and a profound test of character. “To avert disaster,” the contributor Joe Morgenstern writes, “LeMessurier would have to blow the whistle quickly—on himself.” Read the story Also from the Archive The Sky Line Castle in the Air From 2010: Dubai reaches for the sky. By Paul Goldberger Onward and Upward with the Arts Transforming Trees Into Skyscrapers From 2022: In Scandinavia, ecologically minded architects are building towers with pillars of pine and spruce. By Rebecca Mead More from The New Yorker A Reporter at Large The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children As a girl in Austria, Evy Mages was confined to a mysterious institution in Innsbruck. Decades later, she learned why. By Margaret Talbot Letter from Palo Alto Inside Sam Bankman-Fried’s Family Bubble At Stanford Law School, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried specialized in ethics and social fairness. Now that their son stands accused of one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history, they’re scrambling for legal escape routes. By Sheelah Kolhatkar Today’s newsletter was written by Nathan Burstein. Thanks for reading. Let us know your thoughts about today’s edition. Plus, browse more newsletters and invite a friend to sign up for the New Yorker Classics newsletter. You’re receiving this e-mail because you signed up for the New Yorker Classics newsletter. Manage your preferences | View our Privacy Policy | Unsubscribe The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from the products and services that are purchased through links in our newsletters as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. Copyright © Condé Nast 2023. One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. All rights reserved.