The Great Miscalculation The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower

The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents:

The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower
with Michael M. Greenburg

Online via Zoom

How an engineering crisis threatened a building, a career, and the lives of countless New Yorkers

In 1977, the Citicorp Center—a fifty-nine-story skyscraper with a striking slanted roof and columns perched off-center like stilts—instantly became one of the most recognizable features of the New York City skyline. Designed by renowned structural engineer William LeMessurier, the tower was hailed as the crowning achievement of his career. But behind its bold engineering lay a devastating flaw: the building had a one-in-sixteen chance of collapsing.

The Great Miscalculation is the riveting true story of how that flaw was discovered, disclosed, and secretly repaired—an engineering crisis that threatened the seventh-tallest building in the world. As hurricane season approached, the Citicorp Tower’s vulnerabilities posed a looming danger, while the economic turmoil and political dysfunction of 1970s New York made a radical, unprecedented fix seem almost impossible.

Blending engineering, history, and human drama, The Great Miscalculation uncovers the hidden story of a near catastrophe that reveals the very human pressures, compromises, and choices behind one of the greatest engineering close calls of the twentieth century.

Michael M. Greenburgis a practicing attorney and narrative nonfiction author based in suburban Boston. A graduate of Pepperdine University School of Law, where he served as editor of the Pepperdine Law Review, he brings a lawyer’s eye for detail and a storyteller’s ear for drama to his writing.

Michael is the author of five critically acclaimed nonfiction books: Peaches and Daddy, a tale of scandal, media frenzy, and moral panic in the Roaring Twenties; The Mad Bomber of New York, the gripping story of a manhunt that paralyzed a city and gave birth to modern criminal profiling; The Court-Martial of Paul Revere, which uncovers the forgotten military disaster that nearly eclipsed a Founding Father;
This Noble Woman, the inspiring biography of Myrtilla Miner and her fight to educate African American girls in the antebellum South; and The Great Miscalculation, a riveting account of the race to save New York City’s iconic Citicorp Tower.

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Ticket information:

Admission is $10 for OLLI at BCC members and $15 for the general public.

Admission is free for students, staff and faculty from Berkshire Community College, MCLA, and Williams; youth 17 and under, and those holding WIC, EBT/SNAP, or ConnectorCare cards.