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The Leaning Tower of New York

The Leaning Tower of New York

20 comments

·February 4, 2025

hnax

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).

charliebwrites

dhosek

Mentioned in the article

amarcheschi

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

dieselgate

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

thisismytest

Has any skyscraper actually just tipped over?

galleywest200

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...

dieselgate

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

toomuchtodo

Related:

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

crznp

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.

greggsy

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/...

ipnon

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.

mizzao

What is the Dyatlov threshold?

MathiasPius

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.

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mschuster91

> The process promised to save the company six million dollars

What an absurd case of penny pinching.

toomuchtodo

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.

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