The Skyscraper That Couldn't Take a Hint
Episode 1 · Citicorp Center
Citicorp Center, New York, 1978
Episode coming November 1
Why listen?
In 1978, one of New York's newest skyscrapers had a flaw almost nobody knew about. The engineer who found it faced a choice that could end his career, with hurricane season on the way.
Key moments
In this episode
- Why a church on one corner put the whole tower on four stilts
- A tuned mass damper on the roof, one of the first in a high-rise
- A routine question on a Pittsburgh job reveals the welds that never happened
- Two students ask the question the building code didn't
- The math, the wind tunnel and the odds that kept an engineer up at night
- An engineer blows the whistle on himself
- Midnight welders, a hurricane offshore and a secret kept for 17 years
Sources
Sources
- Joe Morgenstern, "The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis," The New Yorker, May 1995 (the primary account)
- "Citicorp Center engineering crisis," Wikipedia, with its citations to the AIA Trust case study, Eugene Kremer (2002), William LeMessurier's 1995 MIT lecture and NIST
- Michael M. Greenburg, The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City's Citicorp Tower, NYU Press, 2025
- Lee DeCarolis, "Citicorp Building: Who Was the Mystery Student?," Online Ethics Center, 2022
- Park, Duthinh, Simiu and Yeo, "Wind Effects on a Tall Building with Square Cross Section and Mid-side Base Columns," NIST, Journal of Structural Engineering, 2019
- CNN, "This New York skyscraper had a 1-in-16 chance of collapse," August 2025
A note on details: the damper's weight (roughly 400 tons), its layer of oil and the count of about 200 joints are widely reported but don't appear in the sources above.
Listen on
Listen to this episode
Episode 1 arrives on November 1 with the rest of season one. Listening links will be added here at launch.
About the show
What Anatomy of a Near-Miss is
Anatomy of a Near-Miss is a monthly narrative podcast about the moments when famous buildings almost went wrong. Each episode follows one project from the first drawings to the close call, then looks at how it was caught, how it was fixed and what the industry learned from it.
Every episode is built on public, well-documented stories. We work from published histories, engineering reports and reputable reporting, and the sources for each episode are listed in its show notes.
About the host
Davide Aternino
Anatomy of a Near-Miss is hosted by Davide Aternino, Principal at Mouldex Composites.
New episodes on the 1st of every month.
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