During the past week, many of the men and women who spend their working lives on the blocks adjacent to Worth Street and West Broadway, in Tribeca, shared a premonition: something bad was going to happen with the giant red crane that loomed in the sky directly above their workplaces.
This morning, an attorney who stood in front of a store called the Balloon Saloon, for instance, explained that, just yesterday, he was driving down the street with a friend and noted how unusual it was for the base of a crane to stretch so far across a street. “I’ve never seen a crane like that,” he said. A project manager for New York Design Architects, whose offices are at the corner of Worth and West Broadway, said that he’d followed the progress of the crane’s construction this past week, from the wooden treads being put in place to the HVAC units it was hauling. It seemed, to him, like the wrong sort of crane to use on the building in question. “It looked fishy, generally,” he said.
It turns out that these suspicions were not unfounded. Today, at 8:24 A.M., during the morning rush hour, the crane in question collapsed, killing David Wichs, a thirty-eight-year-old banker who had been sitting in a parked car. Two more people were seriously injured by falling debris. The crane was being used to replace generators and air conditioners on the roof of 60 Hudson Street, which had been, at one time, the Western Union building. At a press conference, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the structure toppled while workers attempted to secure it in this morning’s storm, during which winds blew at twenty miles an hour. A video filmed across the street, and published by the New York Post, shows the crane detaching from the building and then falling swiftly to the ground, while several men in the background repeated the phrases “it’s falling” and “holy shit.” The video ends just after a chilling boom, audible from hundreds of feet above, despite the cheap audio recorder on the phone that was used to shoot the video. Pedestrians lined up near the crash site—leaning into yellow lines of caution tape, which marked off a perimeter four blocks wide—to take photos of the wreckage. From there, it was just a rectangle of faint pink lines in the distance, obscured by falling snow and the flashing lights of police cars, fire trucks, and other emergency vehicles. Many of the people at the scene were the staffers of restaurants and shops in the area, who arrived outside mostly because they didn’t know what else to do. At the Balloon Saloon, the doors were blocked by police tape, and the shop's usual display of inflated doughnuts and marine animals was missing.
The key holder for the American Apparel store at Thomas Street and West Broadway stood speaking to a police officer about whether or not she could cross the police lines to open up shop. She sighed, when asked about the crane. “It was massive, it looked too big,” she said. She recalled that she’d joked to a friend the other day that it would probably fall. “I know it’s serious, but I feel personally responsible because I made that joke.”
Anatole Kostak, a construction worker, was standing just a block away, waiting for a delivery at the moment the crane came down. He ran toward what he thought was an explosion, he said, because he wanted to make sure no one was hurt.
“I thought it was a bomb,” he told me.
He pulled up a photo he’d taken of Worth Street immediately after the crash. The structure filled the width of the street, with its red steels rods bisecting an entire row of parked cars. An S.U.V. appeared as small as a child’s toy.
Manon Bailly, the host of the Odeon restaurant, at Thomas Street and Broadway, just around the corner, was standing at the front door this morning just as the crane fell.
“It sounded like a very loud crash, there was some rumbling,” she said. A patron sitting at the bar shouted, “It’s the crane,” and ran out, she said. “He came back ten minutes later looking pretty shaken and took his things and left.”
Bailly watched construction workers, police, and people run toward the site.
“I think people were really scared because of the neighborhood and all that happened with 9/11,” she said. Blocks away from the 9/11 memorial, it’s hard not to recall the trauma of that day or the resilience that was displayed afterward.
“We’re open for business. The kitchen is ready,” Bailly said. Earlier that morning, a lone figure wheeled a dolly from the restaurant—the daily oyster delivery. “We’re ready to do our job, if people do come.”
Nearby, an ambulance turned down a corner that was off-limits to press and pedestrians. Its lights were off. For a moment, it was just another innocuous, quiet vehicle that ignited a hope that the workers searching broken cars for people would find nothing—and it could leave the way it came.
