How a Student’s Phone Call Averted a Skyscraper Collapse: The Tale of the Citicorp Center

The Citigroup Center in Midtown Manhattan is also known by its address, 601 Lexington Avenue, at which it’s been standing for 47 years, longer than the median New Yorker has been alive. Though still a fairly handsome building, in a seventies-corporate sort of way, it now pops out only mildly on the skyline. At street level, though, the building continues to turn heads, placed as it is on a series of stilt-looking columns placed not at the corners, but in the middle of the walls. A visitor