Shadowing Practice: New York's Buckling Tower: What Happens Now? - Learn English Speaking with Video
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We're operating at 235 East 42.
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We have columns partially down on 21 and 22, and we have floors sagging between 21 and 26.
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On July 7, 2026, crowds gathered outside 235 East 42nd Street.
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A building is on the verge of collapsing in midtown Manhattan.
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Bricks falling from a former office building that is being converted into luxury rental units.
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While at the time, its developer described the issues as nothing more than a typical construction mishap,
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how often do emergency services close an entire area for routine purposes?
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This is far from a typical construction accident.
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The north side of that building is crumbling.
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The I-beams are bending like cigarettes in there.
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The building remains unstable.
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Since arriving on scene, we have witnessed additional movement in one of the compromised columns.
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Investigations are still ongoing.
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Now, two months down the line, we can look at some clues as to what the hell happened here
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and try and unpack a little bit of how one of New York's biggest building projects got into such a state.
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If you live in a major city, then you've probably seen police tape before.
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But what you may not have seen is a cordon being enforced because authorities were worried that a building might collapse.
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And that is exactly what happened here just a few weeks ago.
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Situated not far from Grand Central Terminal, 235 East 42nd Street sits among a cluster of offices.
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Opening in 1961 as the Pfizer headquarters, it spent the majority of its life going pretty under the radar.
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The building was 33 stories tall, more than three times as tall as its neighbour.
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Joined at its hip is 219 East 42nd Street, a much shorter development that opened in the early 20th century, standing just 10 stories tall.
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These buildings opened in a different time, in eras defined by a drive for office space, when the term work from home would have been gibberish to most people.
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The landscape today is very different.
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The office is still important to the city, but following the pandemic, vacancy rates shot up.
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Meanwhile, as any resident of New York or regular viewer of the B1M is aware, the city is in the midst of a housing crisis.
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With so many empty or partially empty office buildings and a lot of people needing homes, you might start to see a solution.
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New York certainly did.
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In 2024, the city of Yes for Housing Opportunity was rubber stamped, relaxing rules around converting offices into residential spaces.
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Enter 235 East 42nd Street, which I'm going to refer to going forward as simply 235.
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By 2025, construction was underway on what architects Gensler described as the largest conversion of its kind in New York City history.
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Once open, it'll offer more than 1,600 apartments.
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Now this is where things get challenging.
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The smaller tower here is 219 East 42nd, and that's being taken up to 29 or 30 stories, depending on how you count things like mechanical floors.
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Meanwhile, over here, the bigger tower is 235 East 42nd, and that's having four stories added, taking up to 37 stories overall.
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Basically, these two towers were both constructed half a century apart, but they're now being merged into one giant development.
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To put that into perspective, in the time between 219 and 235 being built, America fought in two world wars, stumbled through the Great Depression,
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and fundamentally overhauled its building processes.
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Now looking back, it's easy to see how much things have changed between the early 1900s and the 1960s,
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but in the moment, it's hard to recognize the speed at which everything around us is evolving.
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Today, a lot of the buildings across New York are designed for people like me, who need a desk, a computer, and a healthy supply of coffee to get our work done.
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Hey, does anybody want coffee?
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And at this rate, I spend so much of my time in my office
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that I'm wondering whether I should just live here.
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I can start by getting rid of this desk and replacing it with a super king, but given how hot this summer has been, I'll be keeping the aircon.
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Now let's get back to Manhattan, because there's an office conversion there that kinda needs our attention.
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You see, the smaller 219 was built in the early 1900s with terracotta and cast iron.
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Meanwhile, the taller 235 is a largely steel structure, using material nearly half as strong as some of the stuff you can get your hands on today.
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And so modernising and and redeveloping those two buildings calls for very different approaches.
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Steel from the 1960s is very, very, very different, believe it or not, from steel work from 2026.
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Chris O'Regan is a Chartered Structural Engineer and the Head of Structural Safety at Francombe Consultancy Group.
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While he's not part of the redevelopment at 235, we dropped him a call the week after it hit the news to ask him what he thought.
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The first thing you do is find out what the structure performs, almost reverse engineer the structure entirely, determine what it can actually support.
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Then if there is any need for strengthening works then you design them, apply them and develop them and work them through.
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So preparing these two buildings from different eras to become a single development of the future is one challenge
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and we've already touched on the second hurdle.
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Converting it from office space into residential space isn't easy.
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There are really strict regulations around natural lights and ventilation in apartment buildings that are different to those regulations for office buildings.
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The plumbing will need an overhaul to serve the different residential units.
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There's the potential for the ceiling heights having to be varied and weight distributions differing between the floors.
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We're talking about adjusting support beams to manage loads and create entirely new spaces for completely new floor plans.
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In fact, in 2023 Moody Analytics reviewed more than a thousand offices in the city
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and of those only three percent were viable for apartment conversions.
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Now, we've actually covered an office to apartment conversion project in New York before.
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In 2023 the 1930s era 1 Wall Street reopened as a luxury apartment building with six additional floors added onto its height.
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That required scrupulous planning to calculate the changing loads.
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Lighter, voided slabs were used for the new floors, while the existing structural beams and columns were strengthened throughout the building.
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Crews also created transfer structures to distribute new loads into the older frame very carefully.
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And because apartments are generally lighter than offices, they could factor in a weight reduction for the overall structure, meaning they could get more out of the older frame.
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It's proof that conversions like this are definitely doable, but come with considerable complexity.
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So what the hell happened here?
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How did 235 East 42nd Street get into such a mess?
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Early on July 7, 2026, construction workers discovered that a steel column on the 21st floor had buckled.
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The fire department was called around 8am and it found a number of sagging floors, cracks and two buckling columns.
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In response, workers on the site were evacuated, followed by a full-scale evacuation of nine nearby buildings, including a school.
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The The area was cordoned off as a frozen zone was imposed, and New York City's mayor announced the structural issues to the public.
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Two structural columns have buckled in addition to multiple cracks and sagging floors.
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The building remains unstable.
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We have witnessed additional movement in one of the compromised columns.
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Later on Tuesday morning, officials confirmed the damage was located to a specific section of the development, not the entire building.
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The firm GACE created the building's engineering plan and it was quick to point out what it believed was the main cause.
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As reported by the Gothamist, GACE's principal Chris Behan moved to blame the trouble on a
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lack of reinforcement from the 19th floor to the top of the 21st floor.
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Earlier reporting by the Gothamist showed GACE's plans did actually call for reinforcement along the two columns that eventually buckled.
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Meanwhile, developer Nathan Burman seemed to agree.
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In an interview on the day of the incident, he claimed the issue may have occurred on the 21st floor
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due to additional stress caused by the wait from the 22nd level upwards.
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That was part of a widening of the top 15 floors.
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Burman went on to say the buckling columns may not have been reinforced properly,
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while the city's Department of Buildings said the structure's steel columns would need to be reinforced.
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Simply put, they were overloaded.
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They buckled in on themselves.
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That's how steel columns, and indeed reinforced concrete, any column really, fails typically.
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They buckle in on themselves.
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In order to prevent that from happening, if I were to wrap my fingers around with a bit of tube, like a toilet paper tube, they would resist that force from buckling.
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So this is what they actually prevented and wanted to do.
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And while a criminal investigation is still ongoing, this gives us some idea as to what may have happened.
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The New York City Department of Buildings is responsible for making sure that codes are met and that building projects are safe,
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so as you can imagine it's going to be a major player in this investigation.
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The Gothamist highlighted a complaint note that was posted
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and then deleted by the NYC Department of Buildings
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which reportedly said the failure to provide steel reinforcement as per approved plans led to the cause of the the incident.
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The following week, The Gothamist claims that the Press Secretary of the Department of Buildings, Andrew Rudansky, said the note was posted by a staff member but that it wasn't accurate,
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so it was corrected the same day.
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However, it would seem to align with the views of GACE and the developer.
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As for the columns themselves, they were reinforced with temporary shoring to provide stability and make it safe for assessments to be made.
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In this particular instance, I do notice that where the columns are buckled, the structures actually cantilevers over sails.
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So you've got the column here and it's over sails like this.
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So it's making it even worse.
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You know, they actually applied a significant load on those particular columns.
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I suspect that is why those two actually buckled rather than the others, because the other columns would have been affected by this as well.
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You look at the actual buckled columns and if they've buckled where's the rest of the load gone?
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Because clearly it's still standing, but where's it gone?
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That's a very loaded question, pun intended.
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As you can see now the roads are open again
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and life here is pretty much continuing as normal but it doesn't mean it's the end of a story.
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For the time being, while we wait on the findings of the investigation, we're working off of fire department reports,
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deleted notes from the department of buildings and reactionary comments from the developer and project engineers.
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Columns buckled and, at least for now, there are claims that they were never properly reinforced.
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If that's the case, then it's a major oversight.
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But ultimately the kind of thing that's better to have been discovered at this point than when the building was fully occupied.
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The compromised section of the development faces a rebuild and, depending on what's discovered, there could be a need to adapt the structural system.
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For the time being, Berman says this is unlikely to be a full demolition job.
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As Chris said, we'll have to wait and see where that load moved after the columns buckled.
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We approached Metroloft for comment, but at the time of publishing this video we hadn't heard back from them.
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It's a nervous period for Berman, who suggested this incident would probably only cost a few extra weeks.
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When you consider the ongoing investigation and the amount of redevelopment work that it would appear is required, that sounds pretty ambitious.
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Cranes reported back in 2024 that lease signings could begin in 2026 with move-ins from 2027.
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And so it's worth remembering a developer is beholden to investors and apartment pre-sales.
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There are wider implications too.
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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that lenders and investors in the US are now rethinking projects like this.
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It turns out this isn't the first time 235 has come in for criticism.
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Reports show it had already faced 44 prior complaints against it,
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ranging from falling debris to a worker blowing material off the roof with a leaf blower,
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although emergency services at the time said they found no evidence to suggest that was true.
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What happened at 235 led to safety reviews of a number of office to apartment conversions across five boroughs.
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Three buildings faced stop work orders or partial work pauses
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because of problems ranging from cracking beams to site safety issues and missing paperwork.
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It's too early to say what the long-term consequences of this New York saga will be, but we're going to keep you guys up to date as we get more news and as the investigation moves forward.
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But in the meantime, I think what this really shows for me is just how much we take the construction industry for granted.
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Billions of us all around the world use millions of buildings every day without any incidents.
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There are projects like this happening all around the world every day where nothing's going wrong
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and no one ever hears about them.
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The fact that one ordinary building can go to becoming world news
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because of an incident like this shows just how rare these incidents are
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and actually what a great job construction does most of the time of shaping our world
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and protecting each of us every time we go into a building.
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For me, taking a very glass half full approach, this episode, even though it's terrible, kind of shows how lucky we are.
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This video was sponsored by Rayon Design.
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Don't forget
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It massively helps us out here when you guys take the time to go
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and check out our video sponsors so please do go and check out Rayon we would really appreciate it.
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And as always guys if you enjoyed this video
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and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction make sure you're subscribed to the B1M.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “New York's Buckling Tower: What Happens Now?”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: column, floor, buckled. This video has 169 sentences and 2594 words to shadow. The speech runs for 15:37. The speaker talks at a natural 166 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| columns noun | /ˈkɑləmz/ | pattern which involves throwing props in the air alternately. |
| buckle noun | /ˈbʌkəl/ | A metal clasp with a hinged tongue or a spike through which a belt or strap is passed and penetrated by the tongue or spike, in order to fasten the ends of the… |
| structural adjective | /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/ | Of, relating to, or having structure. |
| reinforce verb | /ˌɹiː.ɪnˈfɔːs/ | To strengthen, especially by addition or augmentation. |
| developer noun | /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/ | A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products. |
| convert verb | /kənˈvɝt/ | To transform or change (something) into another form, substance, state, or product. |
| beam noun | /ˈbiːm/ | Any large piece of timber or iron long in proportion to its thickness, and prepared for use. |
| reinforcement noun | /ˌɹiːɪnˈfɔːsmənt/ | The act, process, or state of reinforcing or being reinforced. |
| sag verb | /sæɡ/ | To sink, in the middle, by its weight or under applied pressure, below a horizontal line or plane. |
| compromise noun | /ˈkɑmpɹəˌmaɪz/ | The settlement of differences by arbitration or by consent reached by mutual concessions. |
| cordon noun | /ˈkɔː(ɹ)dən/ | A line of people or things placed around an area to enclose or protect it. |
| redevelopment noun | The process of developing something anew. | |
| evolve verb | /ɪˈvɑlv/ | To move (something) in regular procession through a system. |
| unstable adjective | /ʌnˈsteɪ.bəl/ | Not stable. |
| investor noun | /ɪnˈvɛs.tə(ɹ)/ | A person who invests money in order to make a profit. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| check out verb | To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.). |
| call around verb | To make several phone calls, usually for the purpose of locating an item, comparing prices or inquiring about a topic. |
| come in for verb | To be subjected to. |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. |
| get back to verb | Return to (an activity) |
| going forward adverb | In the immediate future and beyond. |
| look back verb | To think of (past events) in retrospect (in hindsight). |
| move forward verb | To cause to make progress. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have witnessed · you've probably seen · have changed |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being converted · being enforced · being taken |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 25 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, I'm, isn't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: structural /ˈstɹʌk(t͡)ʃəɹəl/, partially /ˈpɑɹʃəli/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/, ventilation /ˌvɛntɪˈleɪʃ(ə)n/, demolition /ˌdɛm.əˈlɪʃ.ən/
- Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, reinforcement /ˌɹiːɪnˈfɔːsmənt/, cantilever /ˈkantɪliːvə/, evacuate /ɪˈvæk.ju.eɪt/, implication /ˌɪmpləˈkeɪʃən/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like columns, buckle, structural.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.