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Last year’s collapse of a Lower Manhattan parking garage, which killed one person and sparked fears of similar risks at the city’s thousands of other garages, was not caused by an overloading of cars, the city’s Buildings Commissioner said Thursday in response to lawmakers’ questions about the integrity of the city’s structures.
The new finding appears to contradict comments made by some city officials in the hours after the April 2023 collapse of the 98-year-old garage at 57 Ann St., when the fire department and the city’s emergency management commissioner both pointed to the dozens of cars crammed onto the roof of the four-story garage as a likely cause.
Commissioner James Oddo acknowledged at a City Council hearing Thursday “the images that we all saw, particularly of the roof that was collapsed with the many cars on top of it.” But Oddo would not say whether a different cause has been identified by LERA Consulting Structural Engineers, whom the city hired last year to investigate what went wrong.
The allowable load limits in the garage’s certificate of occupancy have shown that it was not overloaded when it collapsed, assistant buildings commissioner Yegal Shamash told council members. A Buildings Department spokesman refused to share a copy of the preliminary report since the investigation remains open, but Oddo said it has been sent to the city’s Department of Investigation and to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. (The D.A.’s investigation into the collapse remains open, a spokesman said Thursday.)
Last week, relatives of the garage worker killed in the collapse — 59-year-old Willis Moore — filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the garage’s owners, 57 Ann Street Realty Associates. The company’s leaders are identified in city records as Alan and Jeffrey Henick; prosecutors have not announced any charges against them.
Thursday’s council hearing was devoted to building integrity, focusing on the Ann Street incident and the subsequent partial collapse of a Bronx apartment building in December. The city has blamed that collapse on negligence by a private inspector, whose license was suspended as part of a settlement, but a full investigation is expected to be completed this summer, Oddo said.
In the wake of the Ann Street collapse, the Buildings Department inspected hundreds of parking garages, resulting in 13 full or partial vacate orders and 237 summonses — mostly under the broad category of “failure to maintain” the structures, Shamash said. (One of the shuttered garages, in the East Village, was sold to a residential developer last month.)
But Oddo said Thursday that the agency is generally opposed to the package of bills introduced in the council last year that would tighten garage regulations by requiring owners to install weigh stations, increase penalties for violations and require DOB to conduct a study on garages’ load-bearing ability. Oddo said garage owners could decide on the feasibility of weigh stations, but argued that most of the other bills were either unnecessary or too burdensome for the understaffed department.
Oddo also announced slight progress on the plan by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration to review the city’s facade inspection program — the set of rules mandated by Local Law 11 that result in sidewalk sheds cluttering sidewalks each time landlords are required to carry out a periodic inspection. The city said last year it would study whether the frequency of inspections could be reduced without jeopardizing pedestrian safety.
Now, the “renowned engineering firm” Thornton Tomasetti is in the late stages of finalizing an emergency contract with the buildings department to carry out that study, which will last 12 months and produce recommendations, Oddo said.
“We want to look at the housing typology, material types, to see, perhaps, instead of a one-size-fits-all, five-year cycle for every building — maybe depending on age, size, material types, we have a different set of numbers,” Oddo said.
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Nick Garber , 2024-04-25 19:05:35
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