The city’s Department of Buildings has hired a private engineer to study last year’s collapse of a Lower Manhattan parking garage, which resulted in the death of the garage’s manager and raised alarm bells over the structural integrity of New York’s aging building stock.
Lera Consulting Structural Engineers will be paid just shy of $1 million to comprehensively study what caused the garage at 57 Ann St. to collapse in April 2023. The engineering firm will document “structural and foundational elements” at the site of the garage, which was fully demolished after the collapse, and review historical records before compiling a bulky report on how exactly the garage was able to come down as it did.
The contract award was published in the City Record on Tuesday and first reported by Gothamist. A spokesperson for the Department of Buildings (DOB) said that the contract had been awarded earlier in 2023 but had only recently been published.
“DOB began investigating this collapse the day it occurred, and our investigation is ongoing,” said DOB spokesperson Andrew Rudansky. “The report that this engineering firm is working on will help determine the various factors that led to and caused the garage collapse.”
The collapse, which killed site manager Willis Moore and injured five other workers, came as the garage built in 1925 held a load of cars far beyond its intended load. The building had also been hit with building code violations numerous times over the past two decades, including for “loose” and “defective” concrete, and the landlord was hit with hundreds of dollars in fines.
Under existing city law, 57 Ann was required to submit a full inspection report to DOB by the end of 2023, but hadn’t done so before it caved in. In October, DOB started implementing a stricter inspection regime for thousands of the city’s garages.
The terrifying incident was just one of several that raised alarm bells over the decaying state of New York’s infrastructure. In November, workers discovered holes in the roadbed of an underground parking garage in Midtown, which for several days forced the closure of Amtrak railroad tracks directly underneath it.
In December, a nearly 100-year-old apartment building in the Bronx partially collapsed. No one was killed or injured, but residents were temporarily displaced from the building which also had a long history of building code violations.
