In wake of Lower Manhattan collapse, NYC has issued various vacate orders to 7 additional parking garages
NEW YORK -- The city continues to crack down on potentially unsafe parking garages in the wake of last month's collapse in Lower Manhattan.
The Department of Buildings has announced more vacate orders.
The deadly parking garage collapse at 57 Ann St., last month prompted Mayor Eric Adams to launch an investigation.
"If there's gotta be immediate actions from existing garages, then we take that immediate action," Adams said last month.
The Department of Buildings issued three vacate orders to two Manhattan garages and one in Brooklyn on Wednesday. In total, the city has now issued orders to seven garages between the two boroughs since the Ann Street garage collapse.
A full vacate order was issued on East 9th Street in the East Village. The garage is owned and operated by the same company as the 57 Ann St. garage that collapsed. Officials with the Department of Buildings say the structure was in a state of disrepair. CBS2 reached out to the company, Little Man Parking, but did not hear back.
On Madison Street on the Lower East Side, the DOB says a garage in an 11-story building had broken concrete slabs within the structure and vertical cracks on columns, walls and ceilings.
And in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a garage on Fulton Street had exposed steel reinforcement beams that the DOB says showed signs of corrosion.
READ MORE: Department of Buildings issues partial vacate order at Chinatown parking garage
The Madison Street garage only received a partial vacate order, so it's still partially open for business, but the DOB says it had a total of 71 cars parked inside. It is meant to hold only 32.
"Even how different things were 100 years ago, when people weren't using these spaces for parking cars at all, can change things fundamentally," said Luis Ceferino, a professor of civil and urban engineering at NYU.
Of the buildings given vacate orders Wednesday by the DOB, two date to the 1920s and '30s. CBS2 asked Ceferino what people parking in garages can look for with an untrained eye.
"It can be very difficult for a non-engineering eye to kind of see some of these failures that can happen or where these problems might be," Ceferino said. "I would encourage people to check on what the Department of Buildings are doing rather than trying to do assessments by themselves."
The DOB has ordered all three garages given vacate orders on Wednesday to hire engineers to compile full structural reports.
