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Manhattan Parking Garage Collapses
By Daniel Butt
On April 18th, nearly an hour after GCHS students were dismissed from school, tragedy struck in Manhattan’s Financial District. Pace University’s fourstory parking garage, located at 57 Ann Street, collapsed all the way to its cellar floor. Four people were hospitalized and one person, manager Willis Moore, was killed. FDNY and NYPD units were quickly mobilized to evacuate the immediate area. The FDNY deemed the structure “pancaked,” and opted to pull response teams from the scene in favor of deploying the “Digidog.” The robotic dog was designed by Boston Dynamics, and this incident marked its first official use in the analysis of a collapsed structure Pace University, which operates a wordd residential and educational neighboring building at 161 William Street, hastily evacuated its classes and compensated dorming students. They have announced that they will close this building for the remainder of their spring semester The parking garage was two years short of its 100th birthday.
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A thorough investigation conducted by the city concluded that the collapse was due to the building’s age, the number of cars parked on it, and a long history of recorded management negligence In 1957, a mandate instructed that the building’s roof was to hold only “passenger-type cars,” which, at the time, were much smaller than the limit-exceeding SUV’s photographed in the word
Pace garage Meanwhile, the City’s Department of Buildings has had a long-standing feud with 57 Ann Street Realty Association, the owners of the parking garage, and has issued 64 building-code violations since 1976. The building lived through a crack epidemic, financial turmoil, 9/11, Hurricane Sandy, and the COVID pandemic, but completed or defaulted 19 of the issued claims. Property owners and brothers Alan and Jeffrey Henrick of 57 Ann Street Realty Association may find themselves under the spotlight of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who opened an investigation on the day of the collapse. The brothers have owned the building since 1988
