The Leaning Tower of New York | Hacker News Reader

The Leaning Tower of New York

newyorker.com

98 pointsdanso42 comments

FYI: The Old (or Skew) Jan Cathedral in Delft, Netherlands (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oude_Kerk_(Delft)) is off by slightly less than 2 meters. As it was built adjacent to a canal, and pile-driving technology didn't exists in the 14th century, it was built on layers of wood and cow skins that started rotting already during its building phase, causing the tower to lean from the get go -- curiously, its four pinnacle towers are straight up. The church houses Holland's biggest bell (the Bourdon at 9 metric ton) which, to reduce vibration and further leaning, is only rung at special occasions re the royal Orange family (births and deaths). Holland's painter Johannes Vermeer also used to be buried there -- because of excessive bad small all graves were cleared late 19th century and dumped in a mass grave some place nobody knows. To the satisfying of many a tourist, an impressive grave-like commemoration stone for Vermeer was installed some years ago.

> off by slightly less than 2 meters

For that to be meaningful, you need the height as well, which is 75 meters (mentioned in the article).

So about 1.5 degrees off center.

(Just sharing because I was curious.)

https://archive.is/GVcHb

Little trivia about... The other famous leaning tower. Pisa has a very soft soil, and there are other 2 leaning bell towers. One is even more tilted than the tower of Pisa. Although much smaller, its tilt is quite strong imho.

https://www.pisatoday.it/cronaca/torri-pendenti-pisa.html

The cathedral of Pisa is slightly leaning as well. If you look at the base just above the steps on its side facing the lawm, you can see the bricks are misaligned

Cookie consent in Italian threw me a bit. Accetta!?

Accetta means accept. You can visit in incognito if you don't want to retain cookies

This building is so perfectly at the Dyatlov threshold it will never be demolished. So much money has been invested, a brutal court battle, PR disaster for the city government, but despite all that it’s so nearly close to be salvageable that we will keep seeing this same story for another 10 or 20 years before someone realizes it should have been demolished in the 2010s.

What is the Dyatlov threshold?

I think it is a reference to the Chernobyl mini-series, where the Dyatlov character responds to the news of the level of radioactive contamination as "Not great, not terrible", unaware that their measuring equipment is actually maxed out, hiding the true scale of the problem.

The Chernobyl mini-series is highly recommended. It is a classic example of how arrogance and stupidity are closely related. (Where stupidity is defines as knowing the correct thing to do, but ignoring the facts or available infomation.)

Isn't the series very dramatized and quite inaccurate compared to the actual history?

If anyone watches a TV show with the assumption that they are getting an accurate view of history, then I wish them luck in life, since they will probably need it.

Tell that to the people who were displaced because of the accident, which of course, is proven truth. The last part of your statement is petty, based on ignorance of how life itself is extremely difficult to report after the fact when facts are so easily denied.

That particular series was presented with very heavy emphasis on how "accurate" it was to real events, though, and many, many people thought it a documentary.

Documentary or not, the photos credits ran at the end of the last episode cannot be denied.

Just keep in mind that it portrays a lot of the characters in a cartoonish way.

Sounds like Millenium Tower in SF

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/series/millennium-...

Mentioned. It's "Millennium" for those trying to find it.

Mentioned in the article

I love how the tower has become a tourist attraction in SF. People pose near the tower's placard and pretend to push the building.

Assuming the neighbor to the north gave up air rights, could this be corrected with guy wires planted in the park one block away?

Makes me think a kerbal citybuilder game would be fun.

The article makes it sound like there is nothing to correct. The structure is crooked, but sound.

You can build a house around it.

Yes, in the article it says many structural engineers over the years have deemed it “unlikely” to have major issues.

Has any skyscraper actually just tipped over?

Weiguan Jinlong is the best example, assuming we consider 17 stories to be a skyscraper.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2016/02/19/...

Not that I can see, but the Citicorp Center in NYC could have if not for emergency actions that were taken

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citicorp_Center_engineering_cr...

The whole welding vs bolting consideration is what’s most interesting to me. I’m still in awe the space needle is 100% bolted

A skyscraper that could have toppled over in the wind (1995) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37684604 - Sep 2023 (21 comments)

Are you not counting the Surfside (Miami) condo collapse?

Also since it talked about the leaning tower of Pisa: the Civic tower in Pavia (1989) and original Campanile in Venice (1902), probably more examples like that.

Approximately the same size of residential structure, a condo tower in Islamabad Pakistan collapsed in an earthquake in 2005. The earthquake didn't collapse any other condos in the same city, it wasn't an extremely severe one, the fault was with deficiencies in the structural engineering and construction.

https://www.google.com/search?q=margalla+towers+islamabad+co...

At 12 floors, the Champlain Towers South in Surfside would generally not be considered a skyscraper.

> The process promised to save the company six million dollars

What an absurd case of penny pinching.

As someone in the medical device field, the concept of marketing/selling something before it exists is wild, explicitly illegal in the USA per the FDA. But here people have written checks for $400k off a sketch of a building. This causes 2 things:

1)enormous pressure to “ship it” on a less-than-ideal timeline.

2)the bean-counters’ perspective gets twisted since they got the “profits” up front, every additional dollar put into the building feels like it’s lost out of their pocket as opposed to the required investment to build the product.

> the concept of marketing/selling something before it exists is wild

Literally restaurants. Or any service, for that matter.

That was also my immediate thought. However, what was the chance that the method they did use would end up not working? If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice? Also the article isn't clear to what extent the lean is responsible for the building not being finished.

You think they could sell a single unit in a tilted highrise? I don't see how risking your entire investment to save a few million with any significant chance of total failure could be +EV.

> If sufficiently low, from an EV perspective, perhaps they made the right choice?

They made the wrong choice. The thing about statistical probability is there’s eventually a right answer - a 1 in X chance collapses into an outcome. They may have made a defensible choice given what they knew at the time, but we now know it was the wrong one.

(That said, I doubt the choice was a good one at the time, either. Wikipedia notes the expected construction budget at $273M, so for ~2% of the cost of the project, they sank the whole thing.)

The NYC ferry terminal on the east side of the financial district has a great view of this, and an even better view from the top deck of the ferry slightly out in the river when it gets going.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/161_Maiden_Lane

i wonder.. what's the average fate/age of such abandoned mega-buildings? Does anyone care to blow them up, or just await them to fall? i guess it's depending on country, and tempora&mores..

There are quite a few (not that high but no-less-concrete-in-them) socialistic-unfinisheds still staying - 30years+ already - around here.. with various excuses for not demolishing, (like, it's expensive!). Some are in middle of nowhere - fine for them, but others are in the center of a city and still..

they will probably fix it once the lawsuits settle, kind of like what they did to SF's millennium tower. The article seems to really focus on Fortis and surrounding scandals, but all the drama aside, this is the most expensive land in the world and the building doesn't seem to be doomed yet.

Abandoned - 1 Seaport (New York's Leaning Tower) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_8lrUPaLIY - Feb 2024

> Rising 60 stories along the East River of Manhattan, 1 Seaport at 161 Maiden Lane, was a luxury condo tower poised to become another iconic real estate venture in the city. However, after major construction mistakes were made, the tower and its owners entered a deep hole of financial turmoil, litigation and failed promises. All of this has left a once $400 million condo tower, completely abandoned in one of the densest cities on earth, now tilting precariously to one side. This is New York's leaning, abandoned condo tower.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com