Saturday, March 15 was the day of the St. Patrick’s Day beer crawl in Manhattan’s east side neighborhood of Turtle Bay, and the streets were teeming with revelers. They were decked out in green t-shirts, floppy green top hats, shamrock stickers, and many had painted their faces green in honor of Ireland’s patron saint. Warm, sunny weather had drawn them out early, and by 10 a.m. bars had already begun dispensing gallons of Guinness. To accommodate the crush of patrons, bartenders up and down Second Avenue — at Jameson’s and Murphy’s, down at the newly renovated Press Box on 49th Street, and up at Opal on the corner of 52nd Street — had put away their glassware in favor of plastic cups.

Meanwhile Brad Cohen, Aaron Stephens, Wayne Bleidner, Anthony Mazza, and other members of the Local 15 of the Operating Engineers Union were working on the concrete and steel skeleton of a planned 43-story tower at the corner of 51st Street and Second Avenue. The builder was ready to begin work on the 19th floor, and the workers were about to “jump” the crane, a delicate operation that entailed lengthening the steel lattice trunk of a 22-floor-tall construction crane that clung like a prosthetic limb to the side of the building. With so much steel and tension involved, any mistake would be disastrous.

As a rule, steel collars placed at regular intervals anchor construction cranes to a building. When riggers add the new sections of steel lattice to the bottom of the crane, the top slides up inside the steel collars, rising higher as each new section is added. The crane at 51st and Second was already anchored to the building with two 12,000 pound collars, and on that St. Patrick’s Day morning, the riggers would latch a third collar onto the building so the crane could be lengthened to allow work to begin on the 19th floor. The new 12,000 pound collar was loaded into four $40 nylon straps and hoisted upward. As it passed the TKth floor, one of the nylon straps snapped, and the mass of steel plunged more than 20 stories, smashing through the lower two collars. Free of its constraints, the crane’s 300-foot tower slowly pulled away and teetered toward the brick apartment building across 51st Street. As if in slow motion, the middle of the crane crashed against a penthouse, pulverizing the roof and crushing the brick wall into red dust. The impact snapped the crane in half; the top section and control cab plummeted down like a big foot on top of two brownstones more than two hundred feet away on the north side of 50th Street. As one of the brownstones was smashed, its innards spewed across the street, bricks smashed through windows. The force even flipped a Mini Cooper automobile. Dirt and clothes and furniture littered the street. The ground shook so violently that people in apartments along First Avenue felt their floors shake and glasses rattle. Many residences thought a bomb had detonated.

Almost instantly hundreds of firefighters, police, EMT, and buildings workers descended on the scene. By evening, police had evacuated all the buildings along Second Avenue between 50th and 52nd streets. Rescue workers secured the lower half of the crane tower that still leaned against the brick apartments on 51st Street, so the wreckage would be stable until authorities could safely take it down. Many people in the neighborhood opened their homes to evacuees until it was safe for them to return to their own apartments. Police continued to search the rubble for victims. Dozens of injured had been taken to local hospitals. The four construction workers from Local 15, Brad Cohen, Aaron Stephens, Wayne Bleidner, and Anthony Mazza, and three others would die.

The city was shocked by the carnage caused by the accident. Elected officials noisily began investigating how such a tragedy could be avoided in the future. Then on May 30, only two months after the accident, another construction crane collapsed on East 88th Street killing two workers. Within a span of two months, the east side of Manhattan had lost eight workers and one local resident in crane accidents. Through the fall of 2008, the city would see a total of 20 workers die in construction mishaps, a toll that was on pace to meet or surpass the 24 deaths witnessed in all of 2007. Many New Yorkers began to wonder if the frenetic growth in construction projects after 9/11, which had been encouraged by city government as an essential engine of economic development, had come at too high a price.

To jumpstart the economy after 9/11, the city offered generous tax credits to developers.
These incentives, along with a flood of cheap credit, fueled a boom in new projects throughout New York’s’ five boroughs. Between July 2000 and July 2007, new permits for construction jumped 433 percent, from three to 16 new projects, and construction spending hit $29.1 billion. And the boom is projected to continue well into 2010: hitting $33.4 billion for 2008, $20.1 billion in 2009, and $26.2 billion 2010, according to the New York City Building Congress, a construction lobby group. In addition, the industry is forecast to employ around 130,100 workers in 2008 and 128,300 workers in 2009. With these contributions to the overall economy of the city, no one in government or private business wanted to slow down this money machine.

The frenzy didn’t affect Turtle Bay until early 2005, when two monster apartment towers began to climb skyward virtually side-by-side on 53rd Street and Second Avenue, and the foundation was in place for a luxury high-rise at 303 East 50th on the corner of Second Avenue. By the early months of 2007, the residential neighborhood — half a square mile of brick-faced walkups and mom-and-pop shops nestled between the glass towers of Midtown Manhattan and the churning currents of the East River — was witnessing whole blocks cleared to make room for towering glass apartment buildings. Between 2007 and 2009, Turtle Bay expected to add 1,100 luxury apartments (each with an average price tag around $1.5 million) and 500 new hotel rooms. Businesses along First Avenue, such as the Metropolitan Restaurant and Columbus Bakery, were razed to make room for the new high rises. Just west on Second Avenue, brownstones, their windows covered with plywood, waited to be demolished. Rents along First Avenue in Turtle Bay had gotten so pricey that even Starbucks decided to leave the neighborhood. “We didn’t want to move,” said David Firestein, a broker with NW Atlantic who advises Starbucks about its Manhattan locations. “We just couldn’t afford the new rent.”

Residents had mixed feelings about the changing face of their neighborhood. Sure, the new construction raised local land values and brought conveniences that come with rows of ATM machines and strings of pharmacies. But many thought the neighborhood was losing its character and soul. A local group, The Turtle Bay Association, lamented the loss of the independent stores that had given the area its own personality. But they were especially concerned about safety as 40-story towers closed in on five-story townhouses, heavy construction equipment literally dangled over their roofs and sidewalks. Bulldozers and dump trucks blocked off streets, creating headache-provoking traffic jams. Fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances often stalled in traffic, their movement slowed by the volume of construction. Then there were the cranes that stretched over 100 feet into the air, their steel arms hovering ominously over the streets and sidewalks, apartment buildings and businesses below. Residents had been particularly suspicious of the project at 303 East 51st Street. The growing concrete skeleton of a building seemed too tall and too thin, almost fragile, and it was crammed into a space that had previously held a five-story walkup apartment building. But it wasn’t just the building that was scary; it was that massive steel crane.

Unlike many construction cranes that are nestled in the center of a project or in an empty lot near the site, this crane was anchored at the corner of 51st Street and Second Avenue, eating up the entire sidewalk and half of 51st Street. It was so close to the corner that a speeding taxi could easily careen into its base if it took the corner too fast. It looked unstable enough that many people quickened their pace when walking past it. Some even crossed the street, putting space between them and the mass of steel. “It just didn’t look right,” said local resident Bruce Siberblatt. “It didn’t seem to be securely anchored to the building. I had a bad feeling in my gut.” Silberblatt, 80, a retired contractor and chairman of the Turtle Bay Association Zoning and Land Use Committee, could see the construction site from a window in his apartment just down the street. On March 24, he filed a complaint with the Department of Buildings, the city’s agency charged with enforcing the safety and zoning laws that govern the more than 950,000 buildings in the five boroughs of New York, explaining that the crane wasn’t properly anchored to the building. In response to the complaint, crane inspector Edward Marquette was dispatched to the site the same day, and he noted in his report that the crane was erected according to DOB standards.

It wasn’t until after the incident that a formal investigation revealed some ugly facts. First, the DOB alleged that Edward Marquette never inspected the crane after Bruce Silberblatt’s initial complaint. The agency alleged he had never showed up at the site and had forged the documents that said everything was fine. Siberblatt said he doubts that the inspection would have prevented the accident, since the faulty nylon strap that broke arrived on the construction site after the scheduled inspection. But the revelations in this case uncovered a web of petty corruption at the Department of Building. Whether this corruption had contributed to the rising toll of construction accidents wasn’t clearly established. But the residents of Turtle Bay were gratified to learn that their concerns about the building at 303 had been justified. The investigations also revealed that the building’s design – a straight highrise that started at the street and rose up 43 stories — violated city zoning laws, which would have required the building to be a tower-on-base style construction, a design that requires a low, wide base of stores and apartments at ground level with the tower built in on top.

The construction boom in New York had outpaced the manpower and resources of the city’s Department of Buildings. Safety and zoning laws had become difficult to enforce. The department seemed to be drowning in a pile of building plans, zoning petitions, and community complaints. In fact, shortly after the March crane collapse, a New York Post investigation discovered that the city employed only two crane inspectors to ensure the safety of more than 250 heavy construction cranes. The Department of Buildings could not keep up with the contractors.

Jessica Lappin, the councilwoman for Turtle Bay and the Upper East Side, aggressively pushed for laws to improve crane safety. She wanted regulations flexible enough that developers would have ample incentive to follow them and the city could enforce them. In September 2008, the city council passed new legislation that came close to her goals. The first part of the measure bans all nylon slings from construction and mandates stronger wire slings. The second section requires all crane workers to take 30 hours of courses on crane safety with follow-up refresher courses every year. The third calls for all workers to attend meetings on all sites before the start of any operation involving a crane, including the assembly, raising, and lowering of construction cranes. Each project must inform the DOB when the meetings will occur (to allow for random spot checks) and must file minutes of the meeting along with a list of those who attended. In a perfect world, Lappin would prefer to have a DOB member at each of these meetings, but with the building boom and the shortage of manpower, such a requirement would back construction up for weeks. Besides the new crane regulations, the tragedy at 303 51st Street flushed out alleged corruption and mismanagement in the city’s Department of Buildings. In April, building commissioner Patricia Lancaster resigned after a city investigation revealed that, because of zoning violations, the DOB should have never approved the building plans for 303 51st Street. The construction should have never started in the first place.

As for the now infamous building, no work has been done since the accident, and Turtle Bay residents are wary of the day construction resumes. On a rainy November 13 night, more than 20 assembled in a classroom at the NYU medical center, their raincoats wet, umbrellas dripping on the rugs, to hear what Kennelly Properties planned to do with the unfinished project. Jim Kennelly, owner of Kennelly Properties, was there in person to present the new plans for the building. Kennelly Properties intends to move forward with construction, he told the crowd, and has submitted a new design that would bring the building into code, including incorporating the tower-on-base design required by the DOB. It is also petitioning for six variances that would modify some code restrictions so that work already done could go forward. It is a long process, and Kennelly estimates that it could take a year of cutting through red tape before any actual work is done. The first step would require Kennelly Properties to raze the structures that surround the building, which it owns, to make room for the base in the base-and-tower style of construction. If the building is brought into code, Silberblatt and the Turtle Bay Association won’t protest the resumption of work.

When it came time for questions, Lyle Frank, the chairman of Community Board Six, who was running the meeting, told the audience that the night’s topic was the future of the building and not the crane collapse. But the crane was on everyone’s mind. One man asked about the placement of any new crane. Another wanted to know the credentials of the future construction company. A woman asked if the building could be constructed without a tower crane as the World Trade Centers had been. Although he had been in the building business for more than 20 years, Kennelly just shrugged his shoulders, claiming that he was only the property owner and had no knowledge of construction laws and procedures.

Several people requested that the building be demolished and rebuilt from scratch. But the board and Silberblatt said that dismantling an 18-story tower would only bring more danger to the neighborhood and would take more than six months, if done properly. “It isn’t like Vegas where we can just implode the building,” he said. In the end, the Turtle Bay Association said it would approve the building as long as it was built according to code. “We can’t do anything about it anyway.” Silberblatt said. “You can’t stop building on private property if the building is up to code.” When the new construction begins, Kennelly agreed to put the crane in a new location on the west side of the building on Second Avenue where it will be further away from neighboring buildings. The neighborhood would not tolerate a crane in the same spot as the old one, Silberblatt is sure of this. “I’ve had dozens of people tell me that they would lie down in the street if anyone tries to put a crane back where it was.”

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