By Lincoln Anderson
Gloria Gavin, who survived chimney collapse, and Detective Mike Singer looking for Gavin’s cat, Lady Diana, who was lost in the accident, last Friday.
Workers repairing a chimney on Bedford St. caused it to collapse last Friday, sending a thunderous cascade of bricks, broken floorboards and debris crashing through the building. Miraculously, no one was injured.
Lori Hurwitz, 38, said she was in her kitchen in her fourth-floor apartment around 11:30 a.m. when she heard a tremendous boom.
“I walked into my living area and the floor of the fireplace was gone – I saw down to my neighbor’s apartment,” she recalled while sitting on a stoop across the street with other tenants from the building last Friday afternoon. Workers were hastily erecting protective sidewalk sheds around 84 Bedford St., as well as two neighboring buildings, 82 Bedford St. – its twin apartment building to the east – and 86 Bedford St., home of Chumley’s, the famous former speakeasy with the unmarked front door.
After her fireplace wasn’t there anymore, Hurwitz said she ran downstairs to check on her neighbor in the apartment below, who was also O.K. Police arrived and told Hurwitz to evacuate immediately.
“I had five cops yelling at me to get out,” she said. “I was thinking, ‘What do I have to pack?’ They were ready to carry me out.”
Then, an hour and a half later, there was a second collapse, and the rest of the chimney fell all the way through to the first floor, raining down a hail of bricks.
An hour before, Gloria Gavin, who is in her 70s, had left her ground-floor apartment to go to the Caring Community at Our Lady of Pompei Church to help serve the seniors lunch.
“If she had been in there, she would have been killed,” said her daughter, Sandy, who grew up in the apartment and runs the Pompei senior center. “She was at the senior center. Thank God, she wasn’t hurt.”
Last Friday afternoon, however, Gloria seemed most concerned about her missing calico cat, Lady Diana.
“I had just left” before the collapse, she said. “I wish I would have stayed, because I could have got my cat out…. She has a beautiful black face with an orange nose and orange eyebrows.”
His hands covered with dust from helping clear debris from the collapse, Detective Mike Singer, Sixth Precinct community affairs officer, said Lady Di was definitely alive, because they hadn’t found her amid the bricks. Traps were put out to catch her.
To get the weight off the first floor, firefighters had tossed the bricks and other things in Gavin’s apartment out the window onto the street. Gloria was able to recover her TV, which was covered with plaster dust.
The landlord offered to put up the displaced tenants from the two apartment buildings at the Milford Plaza hotel in Midtown until Tuesday. However, most chose to shack up with friends.
Asked where he would stay, Mike O’Brien, known as the Mayor of Bedford St., quipped, “They can pick names out of a hat to see who gets me.”
Deputy Inspector Theresa Shortell, Sixth Precinct commanding officer, was on the scene making sure everything was safe. She even bought four pizzas for the evacuated tenants.
An aide to Assemblymember Deborah Glick, Gregory Brender, and an aide to Council Speaker Chris Quinn, Lee Grodin, also were offering assistance to the tenants.
“Deborah’s really upset about this,” Brender said.
The collapse was caused by work on the chimney inside the vacant second-floor apartment, which was being renovated after the tenant moved out two months ago.
“It looks like they were doing demolition work at the second floor, and they removed part of the chimney. Basically, they undermined the chimney,” said Jennifer Givner, a Department of Buildings spokesperson. Givner said two violations were given to the contractor, World Class Demolition, of Long Island City, for failure to carry out demolition in a safe and proper manner and failure to safeguard public and property. Another violation was issued for failure to provide approved plans at the site. Givner said, after the collapse, the exterior walls of 84 Bedford were safely shored up all the way to the fourth floor.
The owner of 84 Bedford St. is listed as Speakeasy 86 LLC, with Martin Cawley as a partner. The work permit was issued to Newcastle Realty Services of 106 Perry St.
A woman whom tenants identified as the managing agent was at the scene last Friday, but declined to comment.
As the tenants from the two buildings were still out standing on the sidewalk, Brian Duea, a contractor who lives down the block, stopped by to see if O’Brien needed a place to stay.
“It’s a neighborhood. We look out for each other,” he said.
Duea, who recently completed a major renovation of the nearby Cherry Lane Theater, is an expert on the physics of old Greenwich Village buildings. With their simple mortar of lime and sand, they need the floor joists to stabilize them, he said. Without these floor beams, the buildings are “just a pile of cards” waiting to topple, he said. Modern mortar can’t be used on the old buildings, because it will expand and crack the bricks, he noted.
“There’s a lot to it,” he said. “You’ve got to be very careful with these old gals…. The shell will stand,” he predicted of 84 Bedford St. “But everything else will have to go. It’ll be six months to fix.”
Duea said it was his understanding the workers removed two layers of bricks in the chimney on the second floor in order to install new chimney flues. He blasted the work as negligent and cheap.
The vacate order at 82 Bedford St. was lifted Saturday morning. After being closed Friday night, Chumley’s was back open for business on Saturday. As of Monday, the vacate order was still in effect at 84 Bedford St.
The day after the collapse, Detective Singer returned, specifically for Lady Diana.
“I’m an animal lover,” Singer admitted, noting he has two former stray dogs, one of which he found on W. 14th St.
It turned out the cat at Moustache restaurant had run out and into the building. The two cats were found hiding together in a closet.
Glick was indeed very upset about the collapse.
“I am, and I’m upset about the whole issue of self-certification, in general, and for very old and fragile buildings,” she said earlier this week. “Since the Giuliani administration, the city has been insufficiently focused on the process of issuing permits and inspecting the work.” Under former Mayor Giuliani, architects were allowed to self-certify construction plans and the city has been auditing only a percentage of them.
However, Buildings spokesperson Givner said, in fact, the apartment renovation plans were not self-certified, but went through the D.O.B. plan examination process.
