A man working on a Murray Hill building’s scaffolding died and three others were injured when the scaffolding collapsed Thursday afternoon, according to reports and the New York Fire Department.
The man was working at a residential co-op building at 136 East 36th Street at Lexington Avenue when the collapse happened around 4:26 p.m., according to FDNY.
It’s unclear if the other injured people were working on the scaffold as well. They were taken to Bellevue Hospital.
NBC 4 reported that no pedestrians were hurt by the scaffold collapse.
The Department of Buildings said the incident was a “suspended scaffold collapse” and the investigation was ongoing.
A neighbor said he heard a “ton of sirens” Thursday afternoon and saw the emergency responders.
“It looks like some of the AC units along the line of the apartment building might have been yanked out, or looks like they're kind of hanging off a hinge or something,” said David Kobayashi, who lives a block away. “Like those little window units, like some of them might have gotten pulled out.”
Kobayashi said the building has had scaffolding up for a while. Online listings for 136 East 36th describe the building as a 12-story pre-war coop built in 1928 with 79 units.
Earlier in the day, a vacant building partially collapsed in a construction site in the same neighborhood. Parts of a building at 211 E. 34th Street at Third Avenue came down around 10:50 a.m., with debris tumbling into a construction site, the New York Post reported. No injuries were reported in that incident.
Last week, another Murray Hill building partially collapsed: a vacant parking garage at 205 East 38th Street near 3rd Avenue on July 8th, injuring a delivery man passing by. The week before that collapse, an empty gym collapsed in Carroll Gardens on July 1st.
