A live television broadcast came to a sudden and chilling halt Tuesday when two New York City anchors were ordered to evacuate their studio as a damaged high-rise across the street threatened to collapse.

PIX11 anchor Dan Mannarino was in the middle of covering the dangerous situation at 235 East 42nd Street when he received the emergency order on-air.

The 38-story building, formerly home to Pfizer’s headquarters, is now a major construction site being converted from offices into apartments.

“We are being told that we have to evacuate the building right now,” Mannarino told viewers, explaining that the troubled tower was directly across the street from the PIX11 newsroom inside the Daily News Building.

“We are gonna have to evacuate the building, reestablish all of this equipment and everything outside to come back on the air,” he continued. “But we’re gonna have to take a brief pause right now as we’re being told to evacuate the Daily News Building, which is right across from this building in question. We just gotta keep everybody safe.”

“Absolutely,” co-anchor Vanessa Freeman replied.

Mannarino then began another sentence — but the broadcast abruptly went silent as the anchors and newsroom staff rushed to safety.

The crisis began shortly before 8 a.m. on Tuesday, July 7, when construction workers inside 235 East 42nd Street reportedly noticed structural support beams buckling on the 21st floor.

The workers immediately evacuated.

When New York City firefighters arrived, they discovered that two columns had buckled and several floors were sagging between the 21st and 26th floors.

The discovery triggered evacuations throughout the surrounding area, including several nearby buildings and a school with roughly 400 students.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said during a news conference that officials were monitoring the unstable structure “minute by minute” as engineers worked to determine whether the tower could remain standing.

One union ironworkers representative described the damage as unlike anything he had witnessed during more than two decades in the construction industry.

“I’ve been in construction 21 years, and I’ve never seen a beam bent in half,” he told Fox 5 New York from the scene. “So this is super dangerous.”

PIX11 later said it would continue reporting on the emergency through social media and its streaming partner, NewsNation, while crews remained outside the evacuated newsroom.