By Julie Shapiro
Downtown Express photo by Elisabeth Robert
Shai Goodman, rounding second, said she was scared when metal debris landed on the Battery Park City ballfields Saturday, but she was back out playing Sunday. “Enough with the condos,” she said. “They should just think about the kids once in a while — they were kids once, too.”
This was one fly ball no one wanted to catch.
It flew in on the wind, dropped like a rock and landed like a knife.
The piece of metal, measuring about 30 by 30 inches, careened toward the Battery Park City ballfield from the 18th floor of the Goldman Sachs construction across Murray St. Saturday afternoon. Upon landing, the steel square sliced into the grass of the outfield, sticking straight up, about 20 feet from the nearest Downtown Little League player.
Shai Goodman, 10, was playing second base for the Dodgers.
“All of a sudden, I look and see this big piece of metal come smashing into the field,” Shai said. “It was a boom, like a foot into the grass…. It could have killed someone in a second. We were so scared.”
Scared doesn’t begin to describe the way the parents are feeling. They are furious at the latest near-casualty caused by construction Downtown, horrified that of all places where the debris could land, it ended up in the middle of a Little League game.
The Department of Buildings stopped all work on the Goldman site and will not allow construction to resume until Goldman Sachs and Tishman Construction Corporation, the general contractor, hold a public meeting with Community Board 1. Goldman and Tishman missed an opportunity to do just that when they turned down an invitation to appear at C.B. 1’s Youth Committee Tuesday night. The falling steel was the main topic of discussion.
“Parents are very freaked out,” said Mark Costello, president of Downtown Little League and a C.B. 1 member. “It’s totally unacceptable. There needs to be a plan in place to make the field safe.”
Shai, the Dodgers player, thinks developers should stop building new towers, especially near the Little League fields.
“There’s enough buildings in Tribeca and Downtown already,” she said. “We don’t need any more. Enough with the condos. There’s a bunch of kids who really want to play baseball and soccer. They should just think about the kids once in a while — they were kids once, too.”
The Buildings Department issued five violations to Tishman and set out a number of conditions that Tishman and Goldman must fulfill to restart work, including holding a public meeting. Tishman must also present the D.O.B. with a construction schedule for the site, said Leah Donaldson, community liaison for the D.O.B. In addition, Tishman and Goldman have to add netting to the building to prevent material from falling in the future.
Just before the accident, workers were using the steel square as a bridge to transport sheetrock between an exterior elevator, called a hoist, and the building, said Kate Lindquist, spokesperson for the D.O.B. When workers finished moving the sheetrock, they loaded the piece of metal back into the hoist and the hoist began to descend.
For an unknown reason, the door to the hoist opened suddenly while the hoist was in motion. The open door triggered a safety device, which halted the hoist. The sudden stop, in turn, likely caused the steel to shift and fall out of the hoist, Lindquist said. The Buildings Department is still investigating. Regional Scaffold and Hoist, the company charged with maintaining the hoist, is looking into why the door opened.
City Councilmember Alan Gerson told C.B. 1 that the piece of steel was not secured within the hoist, which allowed it to fall out and get blown away. A loophole in New York’s building code allows workers to put material in the hoist without tethering it, Gerson said. He is speaking with Acting Buildings Commissioner Robert LiMandri about closing that loophole.
Construction work generally cannot take place on weekends, but the D.O.B. granted Tishman a variance that allowed them to work on Saturdays. However, the variance did not include the delivery of sheetrock, the material the hoist was transporting.
The violations the D.O.B. issued to Tishman included working beyond the scope of the variance; failing to protect public and property affected by construction; failing to perform adequate housekeeping on the 41st through 44th floors; failing to secure vertical netting on the 36th floor; and failing to band and brace material near the edge of the building on the 42nd through 44th floors.
Tishman Construction released a statement Wednesday saying that safety is the company’s first priority. From now on, Tishman will use steel cables to keep metal plates, like the one that fell, inside the hoist. Since the accident, Tishman has appointed two additional full-time employees to monitor the site’s safety. Tishman will also add a mandatory refresher safety course for all tradesmen and safety workers, store materials farther from the site perimeter and add full-height vertical netting around the entire building.
Goldman Sachs issued a statement, saying “We are working closely with Tishman Construction to ensure that their safety measures go above and beyond D.O.B. requirements and to address the community’s concerns.” Spokesperson Andrea Raphael declined to comment further.
Regional Hoist and Scaffold did not return a call for comment.
Noah Pfefferblit, C.B. 1’s district manager, said representatives of Tishman and Goldman told him on Tuesday that they needed more time to develop a response to the accident before they could attend a public meeting.
“I find it appalling that the Goldman Sachs people did not come here and at least listen to our concerns,” said Dennis Gault, C.B. 1 member, at Tuesday’s meeting. “I find that dismissive and unacceptable.”
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and parents want the D.O.B. to revoke the variance that allowed Tishman to do work on the weekends, at least for the four weeks of Little League season after Memorial Day. They also want to see clearer rules for construction during windy weather.
Gerson drafted his own response plan, which C.B. 1 endorsed. The plan would require high-rise sites to have independent site safety managers who are not directly controlled by the developers, as is currently the case. In addition, Gerson wants developers to draft safety plans that address adjacent vulnerable locations, like fields and playgrounds.
Parents concerned about the accident are even more worried when they look at the development sites adjacent to the ballfields, where pile-driving has begun for Milstein Properties’ residential towers on Sites 23 and 24.
“Whatever we decide to put in place with Goldman must apply doubly to Milstein,” said board member Tom Goodkind. He and other parents have long been concerned about wind blowing construction materials off the buildings onto the ballfield.
It is not clear what role the wind played in Saturday’s accident. Parents described the day as windy, but the D.O.B. did not issue a wind alert. Wind advisories are either citywide or boroughwide, but Costello thinks they need to be more localized, to pinpoint conditions in Lower Manhattan.
Jim Cavanaugh, president of the Battery Park City Authority, told Downtown Express that the authority is setting up a meeting with Goldman and the construction managers to discuss safety. The authority is also working with Milstein Properties to develop a safety plan for that construction project.
This was the second major accident at the Goldman building in the last year. In December, a load of steel beams fell and crashed through the roof of a construction trailer, paralyzing an architect.
This time, the piece of steel landed in the outfield of the baseball diamond closer to Murray St., between second and third bases. It happened at the top of the fourth inning, when the Tigers were up and the Dodgers were in the field. The game halted, as parents rushed onto the field to inspect the metal sheet. Then, after glancing nervously at the sky, they hurried their 9 and 10-year-old children off the field in case more was coming.
The steel landed behind where the fielders were standing, but it was still within the field, so if a player had hit a ball that far, the other team would have run out there to field it, parents and players said. Families arriving for the next game routinely cross the field near where the steel hit, and it was a matter of luck that no one was there at the wrong time, parents said.
Brody Sharoff, 10, was sitting on the bench waiting to bat for the Tigers when he looked up and saw the steel heading for the ground.
He got a little scared, but he was more unhappy that he couldn’t finish playing his game.
“I think they should stop building for a little while and see what happens,” Brody said of the Goldman tower. “And if [the falling steel] stops, they should restart, but they should do it slowly.”
Brody’s mother, Leighsa Sharoff, said the community has been through enough since 9/11 without having to worry about this, too.
“I don’t want to feel that I can’t allow my son to play on a ballfield because he could get his head split open by a piece of debris,” she said.
Sharoff wants Tishman to quit working on weekends. A delay in the building’s opening would not be too high a price to pay for safety, she said.
“Will it take the death of a child, God forbid, to make the suits open up their eyes?” she asked.
Notify N.Y.C., the emergency notification system set up late last year by the city, did not send out an alert about the falling steel. The Office of Emergency Management is the one who decides when to send out an alert. The O.E.M. did not return a call for comment.
Along with Downtown Little League, Manhattan Youth uses the fields after school and will use them three days a week for Downtown Day Camp this summer.
“I assume this is a freak accident,” said Bob Townley, director of Manhattan Youth. “It’s very hard to keep an eye on everything. It’s kind of scary — what are our options?”
Kathryn Lynch’s 9-year-old son was waiting for his turn at bat when the steel hit.
“It lodged itself into the ground sticking straight up like a tombstone,” Lynch said. “It would have killed somebody.”
Lynch feels unsafe whenever she walks by construction sites. About six years ago, she was walking beneath scaffolding on Warren St. with her 6-month-old daughter, when a hammer hurtled down from a construction site and nearly brushed the baby. Buildings are going up too quickly Downtown, Lynch said, and she wants to see better safety precautions.
“I used to worry about the ball hitting him,” Lynch said of her son. “Now I have to worry about debris.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
