New York City investigators hit a Queens-based construction company with up to $50,000 in fines for its role in a partial building collapse at a Bronx apartment complex that displaced dozens of tenants last year.
The city’s Department of Buildings released an investigative report on the collapse at 1915 Billingsley Terrace in Morris Heights on Monday, just under a year after the incident. The incident happened when a construction crew working on the building facade removed load-bearing bricks from a corner of the seven-story complex, causing a column of apartments to crumble onto the sidewalk minutes later, the report found.
The investigators said workers from Arsh Landmark General Construction Corp. followed the directive of an engineer, who had misidentified the column as non-structural, and removed bricks from the corner of the building.
When questioned, employees from Arsh told investigators from the Department of Buildings and Department of Investigation that they had not done any work on the load-bearing column that day, according to the report. But it says video obtained as part of the investigation shows what they said was untrue. On the video, the workers can be seen using a chipping gun to remove bricks from the corner of the building just minutes before the collapse, it says.
Additional photos taken prior to the collapse and included in the report show a long, vertical crack stretching through the bricks at the corner of the building, as well as other bricks bulging from the wall.
“The bottom line is that licensed construction professionals are supposed to know how to safely repair a building, and failure to implement proper safeguards when removing structural elements of a building shows an unacceptable lapse in judgement,” Buildings Commissioner James Oddo said in a statement.
Representatives from Arsh did not immediately respond to a phone call and voicemail on Monday. They face fines for allegedly failing to safeguard the construction site and for not alerting the buildings department about the dangerous conditions prior to the collapse, Oddo said.
The company is scheduled to appear before the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings in January.
Oddo previously announced penalties against the site engineer, Richard Koenigsberg, for misidentifying the structural importance of the bricks. Koenigsberg was suspended from conducting facade inspections for two years and fined $10,000. He did not immediately respond to a phone call and voicemail on Monday.
Oddo added that the city has initiated more preemptive inspections of deteriorating buildings and is now adding new staff to handle the reviews as a result of the collapse.
A Buildings Department spokesperson also said officials reviewed 368 other facade filings from Koenigsberg and found no other critical errors.
No one was injured when seven floors of the apartment building spilled onto the sidewalk below on Dec. 11 of last year, but tenants in 46 apartments were forced to stay in city-run shelters until the building was deemed safe for reentry.
In the days after the incident, several residents told Gothamist the building owner, David Kleiner, requested they sign documents waiving rent reductions or claiming they were responsible for other problems flagged by city inspectors, including the illegal partition of apartments, in exchange for getting their apartment keys.
A group of tenants later sued Kleiner and the limited liability company listed as building owner in February for what they said was a pattern of harassment, as Gothamist first reported. The lawsuit remains ongoing.
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark opened a criminal investigation into the collapse but has not charged anyone to date.
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