Deadly accident shuts Times Square

Real Estate Weekly, July 29, 1998 by Lois Weiss

While he was running, something turned the elegant, twin construction elevator tower and scaffolding on the 43rd Street side of the Durst Organization's new building into a disorganized and teetering erector set.

Construction workers say they felt the building shift, heard a boom, and saw the scaffolding and elevator rail move. They yelled and radioed to colleagues and pedestrians on the ground, who ran for their lives while helping to clear the street of morning commuters.

Halfway up, workers helped stop the two elevator cabs, pulling the last man out just as the car separated from its rail and the scaffolding - and fell.

It was still wedged in a pile of unstable, silvery braces last week, as was its companion. A material cab and its rail was unaffected, a spokesperson from Tishman Construction believes.

But the top portion of the elevator rail and debris toppled onto and through the roof of the Woodstock Hotel across the street. A concrete slab killed one 85-year old tenant. Her body was found later in the day by firefighters and dogs searching the wreckage in the SRO.

By the end of last week, it was situation normal in the heart of the Capital of the World: New Yorkers were adapting to the Times square construction accident, with most of the area off limits to traffic and people. Unfortunately, this accident was deadly, and as of deadline on July 24th, still in flux.

The complex, silvery sculpture on the north side of the Durst's 4 Times square was not a new artwork, nor was it an addition to the environmentally sensitive building's lighting, heating and cooling tricks.

This was the remnants of the scaffolding and construction elevator bracing and rail, and as of deadline, remained in and of itself yet another accident waiting to happen.

Each one of the thousands of metal braces, broken bits of metal and wood, loose nuts and bolts, and hastily abandoned tool kits and oxygen/acetylene tanks all nesting and resting on each other, could become an individual lethal weapon. Not to mention the two elevator cabs, still wedged high up in the debris.

To keep this metal rain from further damaging the Times square pedestrian and vehicle parade, the streets around the site were closed for the rest of last week, as was Bryant Park.

But Mayor Rudolph Giuliani touted the "pedestrian mall" created out of a vehicle-less lower Times square, and invited people to come and see a Broadway show - at least the 20 or so ones that were still open.

"Some people actually are urging me to keep Times square closed to traffic forever, because they have been having such a good time with it as a pedestrian mall. I don't think we can accommodate that," the Mayor said, to the laughter of reporters.

But this was no laughing matter. "Cabaret," which has an entrance to its Kit Kat Klub just a steel brace's throw east of what is also known as the Conde Nast Building, was shuttered, and the Mayor made it clear it might not open for a long time.

First, the Tishman Construction crews would have to stabilize the rickety remnants, then carefully draw up a steel-reinforced nylon mesh curtain which will be rolled out and hung from an A-frame at the top. According to Buildings Dept. spokesperson Ted Birkhan, cables will be dropped 50 feet to a square, 50-foot box. Then cables will be dropped to the street to act like curtain pulls, and the mesh will be hauled up to encircle what was left of the construction elevator tower, in theory allowing a safe dismantling - which could take a month or more.

"The debris will not fly, it will hit the net immediately and travel straight down," explained Birkhan. "The men will work from buckets at the top of the tower crane, which is sitting on the roof. The debris at the top and the tool boxes can be removed first, and then they will continue slowly downward." The curtain can be lowered as the debris is removed.

Richard Kielar, a senior vice president of Tishman Construction, said the building's current tower crane will be used to coordinate two buckets, one holding workers to cut the sections loose, the other which they will fill with debris to be lowered to the ground.

"There are about 100 people working now, and this is the amount of people that can reasonably and safely work in the area at any given time, under those circumstances and in the limited areas," Kielar explained, bristling at suggestions not enough people had been assigned.

Shifts are also working 24-hours a day, but before anyone was able to start, there were meetings with the engineers, including Seinuk Cantor PE and the Universal Builders Systems, the construction elevator and scaffolding subcontractors, to determine exactly how safely to go about the dismantling work.

Some lay-people might think a controlled explosion would be best to stem the losses from the area businesses and the city - an estimate, sources say, the Mayor tabs at $25 million a day - but such an avalanche would be extremely unsafe.

Those businesses and residents at the outer fringes of the wind drift complain the Mayor is being too cautious, but there have been too many people hurt or killed by brickwork and falling glass panes this year alone.