Citicorp Center: The Skyscraper New York Secretly Repaired at Night

In 1978, engineer William LeMessurier discovered the Citicorp Center (601 Lexington) could fall in a 1-in-16-year storm. This is the story of the secret repair. In 1978, a crew of welders slipped into one of New York's newest skyscrapers every night at 8 p.m. and left before dawn. Behind the office walls, they were welding steel plates over more than 200 bolted joints. Engineer William LeMessurier had calculated that a strong storm could tear those joints apart, and that such a storm hit New York about once every 16 years. This is the story of Citicorp Center: the church that forced its strange design, the bolts nobody checked, a hurricane that turned away, and a newspaper strike that kept it all quiet for 17 years. It also covers what happened when a 2019 NIST study re-ran the numbers. 0:00 Cold open 1:11 The strangest skyscraper in New York 2:37 How do you hold up a building with no corners? 4:21 The phone call 6:12 The bolts 8:35 One in sixteen 9:56 Telling the bank 10:58 The night shift 12:32 The statement 14:02 Ella 16:17 The secret comes out 17:22 Who called? 18:56 The twist 21:26 What the story is really about SOURCES Joe Morgenstern, "The Fifty-Nine-Story Crisis", The New Yorker, 29 May 1995 D. Duthinh et al. (NIST), modern reassessment of Citicorp design wind loads, ASCE J. Struct. Eng. (2019): https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/winds... NIST, "Blown Away: Revisiting a Famous Engineering Case" (2019): https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-mea... Online Ethics Center, "Citicorp Building: Who Was the Mystery Student?": https://onlineethics.org/node/41606 E. Kremer, "(Re)Examining the Citicorp Case: Ethical Paragon or Chimera" (2002) 1978 New York City newspaper strike; Hurricane Ella (1978) — Wikipedia summaries of NHC/press records Some events are described as LeMessurier recalled them. Where accounts differ, the video says so. Diagrams are simplified and not to scale. Scenes marked "Illustration" are AI-generated reconstructions, not archival footage. Photos: Gunnar Klack (CC BY-SA 4.0); Kidfly182 (CC BY-SA 4.0 / CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Narration voice is AI-generated. #engineering #documentary #skyscraper