Scene report from Manhattan's collapsing high-rise.
"I wrote off the pair of enormous fire trucks ripping past me down Broadway at 8 a.m. yesterday as an oddity."
Good afternoon, everyone.
Last night, I attended my friend Jack Klein’s talk about subway temperatures in the back room at PubKey (sick website). Jack invited me to introduce him ahead of his presentation, which was easy for me to do. I’ve been a fan of his work since I interviewed him for Feed Me last summer.
I said this last night, but Jack really cares about small interventions that can make a difference in the quality of life and comfort of New Yorkers. Zohran Mamdani had that bump at the entrance of the Williamsburg Bridge smoothed out in January; Jack took it upon himself to hand out water in the subways during the heat wave last week. One thing Jack said that stuck with me was that with natural disasters like fires or floods, there is physical residue of the issue in question. Where with heat, once the city cools down, we all forget how hot it is. If any of you look into Jack’s work and research, and would like to get involved or offer some ideas, let me know and I’ll connect you.
Today in Feed Me: Hotel Chelsea’s owner expands into midtown, burnout is surging among tech workers, a new members’ club in Battery City (random), a dream editor-in-chief executive assistant job, reading 1984 in the time of Meta Glasses, Tory Burch’s sparkly new hire, and celebrities are buying American Style merch.
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What will happen to this now-beleaguered building? By Feed Me’s Anonymous Transit Expert.
The Anonymous Transit Expert has to stay anonymous because he has a Real Job in a Real Office.
Through June, New York is having something of a banner year for housing, announcing that nearly 40,000 units were added to the City’s perpetually-short housing stock in 2025 and that the City is poised to bring as much housing on-market every month through the end of the decade as San Francisco builds in an entire year. Better still, the coming influx of monied datanauts at Anthropic or Citadel or OpenAI will have plenty of ultra-expensive, strangely-shaped, full-amenity apartments to lease as the City doubles its already sizable lead in transforming Manhattan’s dumpy Reagan-era office space into residences. The pipeline today, stoked further by Mayor Adams’ “City of Yes” zoning reform and Mayor Mamdani’s YIMBYish tendencies (and despite the rent freeze), leaves New York with a real outside chance of meaningfully cutting its housing supply shortage, which drives so many out of the City and State seeking more comfortable (economic, physical) conditions to form families.
With all of this good news, and while still riding the highs of a new apartment and quitting my job, I wrote off the pair of enormous fire trucks (in their own PE-driven shortage) ripping past me down Broadway at 8 a.m. yesterday as an oddity. After settling in at my desk, I learned they were in fact responding to the sagging, shifting former Pfizer headquarters, where five floors started blowing out under added stress from new construction grafted onto the existing structure. While Uncles everywhere made the same joke about the perceived irony of the Pfizer building collapsing, the building itself, one of the largest (~1,500 units) and most expensive (~$700 million of loans) office-to-residential gambles to date, just sort of…sat there doing nothing.