Episode Details

In the late 1960s, brokers for a major bank quietly bought 31 parcels on the Manhattan block between Lexington and Third Avenues and 53rd and 54th Streets. One owner refused: St. Peter's Evangelical Lutheran Church, a congregation of under 300 in a 1905 Gothic building on the northwest corner. The deal that followed had the bank buy the church's airspace, build it a new sanctuary on the same corner, and raise a 59-story tower over it. Architect Hugh Stubbins and structural engineer William LeMessurier lifted the offices 114 feet on four stilts placed at the middle of each side, not the corners, and hid a stack of giant chevron braces behind the aluminum skin to channel 24,000 tons of steel into those four legs.

Everything about the building was a workaround: 20 double-deck Otis elevators serving odd and even floors, a 45 degree roof designed for solar collectors that MIT researchers ruled out, and a 400-ton concrete tuned mass damper floating on a film of oil near the top. In 1974 the steel contractor swapped welded chevron joints for cheaper bolted ones, and LeMessurier's office approved it. In 1978 engineering student Diane Hartley asked how the tower handled quartering winds hitting its corners. The recalculation showed a storm capable of toppling it had a 1 in 55 chance each year, and 1 in 16 if a power failure stopped the damper. With hurricane season coming, crews worked through the nights welding steel plates over more than 200 joints.

• Why a congregation of fewer than 300 people forced one of the strangest structural layouts in New York
• How the double-deck elevators cut elevator shaft space by 24 percent and avoided 26 extra shafts
• The economics of the damper: about $1.5 million versus roughly $5 million for 2,500 extra tons of steel
• How office workers came in each morning to patched drywall, unaware of the night welding behind it
• Landmark status in 2016 as the city's youngest landmark, and St. Peter's recovery from a 2021 water main flood