Wall collapse between 331 and 335 Grand Street (Havemeyer and Marcy), leads to evacuation of three buildings. It sounds as though the party wall failed or was compromised between 331 (a three-story building dating to the 1830s or 1840s) and 335 (a four-story building dating to the 1850s).
Partial Wall Collapse Leads to Evacuations in 3 Buildings in Brooklyn
Watch This Building’s Wall Collapse Onto a Brooklyn Woman
Scary shades of construction booms past. DNA has more info on the collapse, including a quote from the “sad” building engineer.
NYC Housing Construction on Slow Road
According to REBNY, the decade is starting out slow in terms of new housing construction.
Williamsburg seems to be holding its own, however. Walking through the Southside today, it seemed as though every soft site between Broadway and Metropolitan was under active development.
AG Sues Developer of 57 Maspeth
Shoddy construction from circa 2006, the real boom times in Williamsburg condo construction. Based on the number of condos that went up between 2004 and 2008, the fast pace of construction and low level of oversight, this is probably not an outlier.
Schneiderman is seeking $1.3 million in payback for unit owners – to cover the alleged damage and $75,000 in legal and professional fees – as well as an $85,000 penalty that would go to the state, and an order that would effectively permanently ban Schwartz from selling condos in New York State.
[via Brownstoner]
Rogue Construction on North 7th Street
Residents of N. Seventh Street in Williamsburg are fuming over a new condo being built so close to its neighbors that its scaffolding juts into their terraces and bits of building debris fall onto their property. … The four-story concrete structure developed by Greenpoint contractor Michael Siwiec is [next to] a four-story stone building constructed before World War II.
Not a stone building.
Permastone, that is. Odds are it is wood frame underneath. And from well before World War II.
Yeah, it sucks to have a sidewalk bridge installed in front of your house. Sucks more to have a brick fall on your head, though. Seems to me the owner should embrace the sidewalk bridge (it might even be their legal responsibility to allow it), particularly if the builder is the nightmare that they claim he is.