For some Park West Village residents, walking home can be a frightening experience.
A month after city officials cleaned up a collapsed shed at the construction site on 97th Street, a group of locals say they still don’t feel safe.
Park West Village—a group of seven residential buildings from 97th to 100th Street—has had continuous construction in its backyard since 2006, as developers Stellar Management and the Chetrit Group continue to build multiple new condo towers and retail units. Two years after a retaining wall collapsed at 808 Columbus—outraging many community groups—a mobile crane hit a sidewalk shed last month, partially collapsing it onto a walkway.
Paul Bunten, president of the Board of Directors for Westsiders for Public Participation, Inc.—a local non-profit—has been in contact with Councilwoman Melissa Mark-Viverito, CC ’91, and the Department of Buildings, launching an effort to get answers and set up an open forum meeting with the department commissioner.
On October 23, the Department of Buildings responded with a letter, which Bunten shared with Spectator, outlining the details of the incident and the city’s response. Bunten said that this was not nearly enough of a reply, since it falls short of addressing why the accident happened in the first place.
“We want to know why we should feel safe walking the streets of this neighborhood. They know anyone walking under that would have been killed,” Bunten said. “A bureaucratic response is not enough. We want a meeting.”
Department of Buildings spokesperson Carly Sullivan said, “There were no injuries and there were no fatalities. As soon as the department was notified, inspectors went out there. The part of the crane that malfunctioned has been removed and it was replaced.”
Sullivan said that large construction sites such as Columbus Square are monitored by special teams on a weekly basis and, since 2007, the department has taken several citywide steps to increase safety at projects of this scale. Such measures include a large analysis of crane operations, a contractor tracking system to monitor specific individuals, as well as legislation that holds contractors more accountable.
Peter Rosenberg, development director at Stellar Management, wrote in an e-mail, “We take all accidents very seriously especially when they involve cranes. We work diligently to try and minimize their occurrence implementing secondary safety measures and redundant systems.”
Rosenberg added, that, during crane operations, flag men stop pedestrian traffic while the cranes are actually in motion. So even though the bridge was damaged, passersby were kept out of the area.
At the public forum Mark-Viverito hopes to set up, “What I’d like to hear at this meeting is a detailed, public account of what happened the day of the crane accident, and what the Department is doing to prevent future incidents like this one,” she wrote in an e-mail.
She added that the neighborhood has suffered far too much throughout this construction project, and the “developer in particular has maintained a very negative relationship with the community from the very beginning.”
In response to whether or not representatives from the developer would attend this kind of public forum, Rosenberg pointed out that they currently have two regular community meetings with the Park West Village Coordinating Committee and the Park West Village Construction Task Force—both of which involve Department of Buildings participation and discussions of safety.
For some community members, anxiety over construction persists—though several said they see the recent accident as a minor blip. “I took them at their word it was a small accident that was immediately cleaned up. Life went on,” Win Armstrong, a resident at 400, said.
But for Bunten, the recent accident merits immediate action. “We are not trouble makers—we are trying to solve a problem here,” he said.
Maggi Peyton, president of the Park West Village Tenants’ Association, said that it was a waste of their energies to devote time to this issue, noting that there are several more pressing matters. “I just think that this was an accident—no malfeasance was done on anyone’s part,” she said. “We are beating a dead horse by worrying about this.”
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