Flatbush building collapse on Flatbush Avenue leaves victims from South and Central America dead as New York City faces frequent structural failures, The New Yorker reported.
The disaster at 1321 Flatbush Avenue follows a series of high-profile structural failures across New York City. In July, former midtown offices of Pfizer partially collapsed during an office-to-residential renovation. A concrete parking garage near City Hall pancaked in April 2023, killing one person and injuring seven others. A vacant tenement building also crumbled near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel three years prior.
“These buildings that have been around since the early nineteen-hundreds, they’re beautiful and they have character and charm in many regards,” Melanie La Rocca, a former commissioner of the city’s Department of Buildings, told The New Yorker. “What’s the old saying? They don’t make them like they said they used to,” La Rocca said. “Who knows what people thought back then?”
Many old row buildings across the city stand longer than their builders ever imagined, often suffering from poor maintenance. “How do we create an environment where the housing stock can and is prepared to exist for the next hundred years?” La Rocca, now the chief operating officer of Riseboro, a large Brooklyn community-services provider, told The New Yorker.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and city officials vowed to conduct a full investigation into the Flatbush Avenue collapse. “There are no words for a loss of this magnitude,” Mamdani posted on X.
Olufemi Falade, the landlord of 1321 Flatbush Avenue, is a former New York State Department of Environmental Conservation engineer previously sent to prison for twelve days for refusing to fix eighteen hundred violations across twelve buildings he owned. “How can a landlord fix if the tenant does not pay rent?” Falade told the Village Voice in 2006.
The construction site next door to 1321 Flatbush Avenue is owned by an L.L.C. tied to developers Robert Fischman and Judy Swimer. Gothamist reported that the developers were known for cutting corners at the site. The Department of Buildings previously issued a stop-work order during the demolition of an existing one-story building in March after determining contractors failed to install required safety precautions.
To keep adjacent properties from falling, an engineering firm advised that significant digging and structural stabilization be performed, utilizing concrete, timber, and steel supports. It remains unclear if workers took those precautions. Developers initially planned a three-structure on the site before telling the city they aimed to build a nine-story structure instead.
The Flatbush neighborhood, long known as Little Haiti due to an immigrant community taking root in the nineteen-sixties, faces rising prices, rents, and new glass-and-steel apartment towers. “They were digging down,” said Department of Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani during a Wednesday press conference, where he addressed the site activity occurring at the moment of the collapse.
Mamdani said that most victims at 1321 Flatbush Avenue came from South and Central American countries, including Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia. Two victims were Guinean immigrants from West Africa. Many new arrivals continue to live in cramped and dilapidated housing that poses severe safety threats.
Related reading