NYC penalizes building engineer in wake of Bronx apartment building collapse

New York City’s buildings commissioner says his agency is suspending an engineer’s authority to inspect building exteriors after a crucial error led to the partial collapse of an apartment complex in the Bronx's Morris Heights neighborhood on Monday.

The revelation comes after three witnesses and a government official briefed on the collapse told Gothamist that workers were jackhammering and removing bricks from a ground-floor support column at the seven-story building shortly before the disaster.

Department of Buildings Commissioner James Oddo said the engineer mistakenly deemed a load-bearing column “decorative” in plans filed with the agency in June.

“The engineer failed to recognize a clearly structural column as such, and he can no longer be out there making assessments of the structural integrity of exterior walls of New York’s buildings,” Oddo said in a statement. “We got lucky that no one was killed in this collapse; we will not take that risk again.”

He said the agency was reviewing 368 other facade reports filed by the engineer in the most recent five-year inspection cycle.

The engineer, Richard Koenigsberg, said he did not know about the penalty until Gothamist contacted him while he was driving to the building site at 1915 Billingsley Terrace on Friday afternoon.

“They haven’t notified me yet,” he said, declining to comment further.

In a brief interview on Thursday, Eric Castillo, the owner of a bodega on the building’s ground floor, said the workers were hammering into the bricks just before the collapse.

“They were removing the bricks,” Castillo said in Spanish. “We were scared, but we didn’t know it was going to collapse.”

Andre Soto, a superintendent at a nearby apartment complex, said he was also stunned to see workers hammering into the corner of the building, where a crack had been growing for years.

“You can’t do that, that’s the corner,” he said, adding that neighbors had long worried about the growing cracks, which appear in Google Maps images of the building.

Although the Monday afternoon disaster did not result in any deaths or serious injuries, it has displaced 174 people -- including 44 children -- from their homes, according to the Red Cross, which is assisting the tenants.

Construction crews at the site on Thursday were using a crane to demolish the remaining sections of crumbled apartments, with some of the tenants’ possessions still visible from the street. A child’s pink jacket could be seen hanging from a door in one apartment..

Tenants were allowed to re-enter the building to retrieve some items on Thursday, but two told Gothamist they are too scared to return permanently.

“My mom is still nervous and doesn’t feel well after what happened,” said Angel Soto, who lived in a third-floor unit with his mother and is not related to the super. “She is very shaken up. I hear a lot of others are the same.”

DOB spokesperson Ryan Degan told Gothamist the agency is inspecting all the buildings associated with David Kleiner, the Bronx building’s landlord, and his affiliates. Degan said the DOB had not yet identified any structural problems at those other sites.

Kleiner did not immediately respond to a phone call on Friday.

A spokesperson for Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark told Gothamist this week her office is also investigating the cause of the collapse.