The second floor of the lower Manhattan car park collapsed onto the first, New York emergency officials said, according to CBS News.
Video footage from the scene cited by CBS News showed a rescue operation getting under way.
But firefighters responding to the collapse were pulled back from the immediate scene “out of concerns about the structural stability of the building”, the New York City Fire Department said in a statement.
In the meantime, emergency personnel were doing their best to account for anyone who may have been trapped, the department said.
It added all workers in the building have been accounted for.
“It felt like an earthquake,” said Liam Gaeta, a student at nearby Pace University. He said he heard “a large noise and a big rumbling, and then we all got evacuated”.
