Bronx Collapse renews questions about the safety of the aging housing stock

Around 3 p.m. Monday, Maria Vargas was in her daughter’s room on the third floor of their apartment building in the Bronx when cracks appeared in the walls.

One wall was split down the middle. Ms. Vargas, 55, whose husband is the building’s superintendent, joined a gang rushing for the exit. Then the entire corner of the building collapsed, sending tremors through the neighborhood and tearing down the guts of several homes.

“I thought to myself,” Ms. Vargas said, “Oh my God, I’m going to die.”

“I didn’t sleep,” she added. “Every time I close my eyes, all I see is the crumbling room.”

No one was killed or seriously injured in the partial collapse of the 46-unit building in Morris Heights. A day later, officials offered few conclusions and said the incident was under investigation.

The collapse shined a brighter light on the limited oversight of aging infrastructure, especially after the fatal collapse of a Manhattan parking garage in the spring and the 2021 disaster at a Florida apartment building.

Before the Bronx collapse, residents had complained about numerous problems, including facade issues that had not yet been resolved, city construction documents showed.

Miriam Rodriguez, 63, said she has lived in the building for 30 years and had previously called the city with complaints.

“Everything could be repaired, from the floor to the ceiling,” she said, adding: “There was a crack in the walls on the outside corner that collapsed. It got wider and wider and no one ever did anything about it.”

Abi Aghayere, a civil engineering professor at Drexel University who studies construction defects, said he did not believe the city’s oversight of buildings was sufficient.

He said regulators tend to pay closer attention before and during construction, or when an owner applies for permits. After that, the responsibility to identify and fix problems almost always falls on the owner, he said, adding that New Yorkers should be concerned.

“I was thinking yesterday,” he said, “that I could live in that building.”

By law, a building owner must hire licensed engineers and contractors to conduct periodic inspections. Retaining walls, e.g. must be inspected every five years. Boilers must be inspected annual. City inspectors can also respond to resident complaints or conduct surprise inspections.

Asked Tuesday whether the city should change its policy, Mayor Eric Adams said he believed in owners’ plan to use outside, certified engineers and architects to assess safety issues. But he also said the city needed to make sure the system was working properly.

“Every collapse is a bad collapse,” he said. “Many of our buildings come from older stock. You have that every now and then.”

Officials from the Buildings and Housing departments said they were not aware of any warning signs that could have predicted the crash. The Bronx District Attorney’s Office said it is investigating the collapse.

Richard Koenigsberg, an engineer overseeing repairs to the building’s brick facade, said a contractor had been at the site on Monday, but no work had been carried out in the area of ​​the collapse in the past month.

The facade was not merely decorative, but carried some of the weight of the 96-year-old building, as is common with tenements of the era, he said.

Mr Koenigsberg said he would not speculate on the cause of the collapse. But he said it was “not a facade collapse,” adding: “I strongly suspect it was a catastrophic collapse of the structural column in the corner of the building.”

Mr. Koenigsberg said he met with Department of Buildings officials on Tuesday and was cooperating with their investigation.

Mr Koenigsberg, who has been inspecting and overseeing their repairs on facades of buildings in the city for more than 30 years, said the collapse was unforeseeable. In the context of the 1998 local law requiring periodic inspections of facades, he said: “This is a very rare form of failure.”

He had declared the facade unsafe in 2020 to indicate the need for a sidewalk shed to protect pedestrians during repairs. That work was delayed by the pandemic, but he said the collapse was “certainly unforeseeable as a result of not doing the work sooner.”

Whether and when to make repairs would have been up to the building’s owner, city records showed it was a limited liability company, 1915 Realty. The man listed as director of that company, David Kleiner, could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Outside the shelter set up for residents of the building at Bronx Community College, American Red Cross spokeswoman Desiree Ramos Reiner said the group was trying to place 146 members from 46 households across the city.

Ms Vargas’ daughter Sharlene, 23, a pharmacy technician, said Monday would be her day off. She usually spends it resting and cleaning her bedroom, which she shares with her two-year-old daughter. Instead, she picked up an extra shift, which she rarely does.

“I hear this is happening,” she said, “and I feel, I don’t know, shocked.”

Her bedroom is now on the floor.

“You can see my daughter’s jacket hanging in the room,” she said. All the Christmas gifts she bought are in the rubble, including a Build-a-Bear stuffed animal for her daughter.