The nail-biting story, replete with questions concerning engineering ethics, has been rehashed many times in the last three decades. But Michael M. Greenburg, an attorney by profession, provides a gripping and fresh account of the would-be crisis in his new book, The Great Miscalculation: The Race to Save New York City’s Citicorp Tower.

Greenburg is an astute chronicler who vividly evokes the backdrop against which the Citigroup Center near-catastrophe takes place. The tower rose as New York was at its nadir. The 1977 blackout happened three months before the building opened; some still called the Big Apple “Fear City.” Citigroup, rather than retreat to a suburban corporate campus, bet on the city’s future and built a new headquarters at 53rd Street and Lexington Avenue. There was a major holdout, though, as the bank amassed building parcels: St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, with a shrinking congregation and a backlog of unfunded repairs to its 1905 Gothic Revival home. The church agreed to its own demolition in exchange for payment and construction of a new, modern sanctuary, partially below grade, on the existing site.

This arrangement guided the design of the tower, which sits atop a structural deck some nine stories above grade and cantilevers over the new house of worship, while making room for a public plaza. LeMessurier was approached by Stubbins to collaborate and, in a napkin sketch, proposed a steel-braced system with 10-floor-tall diagonal members resting atop columns placed at the center, rather than corners, of each elevation’s base. Construction commenced in 1974, and three years later Citicorp Center opened its doors to praise for its graceful, singular design. There was a potentially fatal flaw, however, that the team didn’t know about lurking in the detailing.

Princeton University engineering student Diane Hartley, researching a senior thesis focused on the tower, and New Jersey Institute of Technology architecture student Lee DeCarolis, seeking clarification following a classroom conversation, independently raised questions to the structural engineering firm and LeMessurier himself about the perimeter bracing system’s capacity to withstand sustained diagonal wind loads. (New York’s building code at the time required only that structural engineers assess perpendicular wind-load capacity). A cost-cutting decision, unknown to the students, by the steel erector to swap out the original design’s welded joints for weaker, bolt-connected joints compounded the structural dangers.

After LeMessurier consulted other experts and reassessed the building calculations, he discovered that, should diagonal winds exceed 70 miles per hour, and should the tower’s tuned mass damper be made inoperable by loss of power, Citicorp Center had a one-in-16 chance of structural failure. The engineer blew the whistle on himself, and a constellation of figures—high-powered financial executives, litigious attorneys and insurance agents, municipal bureaucrats, inimitable skyscraper engineering experts—descended on Citicorp Center to manage the retrofit and potential public relations fallout.

Greenburg provides a painstakingly detailed, fly-on-the-wall account of these events. Like a good litigator, he uses interviews and exhaustive research to bring to life the cast of strong, flawed, hubristic characters as they engage in a herculean effort to avert potential disaster. He shines a light on stakeholder deliberations and the ethical questions they raised, from the decision to keep the public in the dark regarding the skyscraper’s compromised structural system, conducting repairs (welding 2-inch-thick steel plates over all bolted joints) in the dead of night, to the design team’s failure to properly assess the substitution of welding for bolting in the first place. His Robert Caro–like dedication to turning every page even led to unearthing LeMessuerier’s primary record of the crisis, “Project SERENE—or Special Engineering Review for Events No One Envisioned—within the depths of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design’s archive.

That effort to put the reader into the story is undercut somewhat by the curious omission of technical drawings. All that’s included is a rudimentary diagram highlighting perpendicular and quartering winds. We also never know if St. Peter’s was affronted by the congregation’s exclusion from conversations pertaining to disaster preparedness and the skyscraper’s retrofit—another missing piece that stands out for how important the church was to the tower’s initial design and the sanctuary’s location underneath it.

Still, Greenburg’s history of what is now the Citigroup Center adroitly, and with nuance, puts a fresh spin on a familiar story that continues to offer lessons for the building professions writ large. Ignore them, and this book, at your own peril.