The glass cube of Apple’s 5th Avenue Store in New York City might look iconic, but there’s one big problem with glass: It shatters. And in the latest wave of polar weather to hit the East Coast, that’s just what happened when a snowblower got too close to the Apple Store.
As you might know, Apple’s flagship 5th Avenue Store right off Central Park is topped with a beautiful, 32-foot-tall glass cube. This massive cube, in turn, is made up of 15 separate glass panels (it was composed of 90 separate panels before it was architecturally streamlined in October 2011).
On Tuesday, though, as a major snowstorm pounded the East Coast, one of the glass cubes shattered. According to a statement made by Apple to Buzzfeed, the accident occurred when one of the snowblowers used by cleanup crews smashed into the panel, damaging it.
Although the glass is shattered, it is still standing, and Apple has no intention of closing the 5th Avenue store while the cube gets fixed. The damage is likely to be expensive, though: It cost $6.6 million back in 2011 to install those 15 panels of glass. That means replacing one could cost as much as $440,000. Hope they don’t take it out of the snow crew’s paychecks.
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
