Tishman Construction executives admitted last week that the pieces of glass that rained down from the new Goldman Sachs Tower in Battery Park City on Nov. 28 came from a window that had been cracked for more than two weeks prior to the accident.

Robert Blackman, Tishman’s executive vice president, said workers had spotted a half-inch-long "hairline" crack in a window on the 38th floor of the $2.4 billion office tower on Nov. 13, but chose to put off replacing the glass until after the external construction hoist on the north face of the building was dismantled.

“[The broken glass] was deemed not to be a safety concern to us,” Blackman told a Community Board 1 members Tuesday night, upset over this, the fourth reported incident of falling objects from the site. “I would have been the first to have stopped the job if we thought it posed a risk to this community.”

Blackman said “unusually high winds” the morning of Nov. 28 were likely what spread the crack across the upper portion of the 10-by-7-foot window. Around 7:30 that morning, pieces of the window fell off of the building, landing on West Street and on a platform inside the construction site.

Following a city-ordered inspection of the entire building’s exterior, Blackman said the company found five more windows with cracked glass. Those panes, he said, were to be replaced by noon on Wednesday.

“During the course of construction, glass does tend to get damaged,” Blackman said. “We wouldn’t leave them in place if they were severely cracked, to the point where we felt there was a safety issue. But these handful of windows, we felt, were not safety issues.”

Alberto DeGobbi, CEO of Permasteelisa North America, the windows' manufacturer, said while having to replace broken glass during and after construction is an industry standard, the circumstances of Saturday's accident seemed to be unique to the Goldman Sachs tower.

"This was pretty strange," DeGobbi said. "We've never seen what has happened here. Simply, I think it was an effect of the wind."

No one was injured as a result of the glass falling, but the mishap prompted police to shut down West Street in both directions for several hours. The closure, coupled with the up-tick in cars traveling in and out of the city for the holiday weekend, set up gridlock conditions all over Lower Manhattan.

“We deeply regret this,” Tishman president John Livingston said. “It would have been devastating for all of us if something tragic had happened. We pride ourselves on our concern for safety.”

The 740-foot office tower, due to be completed early next year, already houses around 1,000 Goldman Sachs employees.

“Our interests are very closely aligned with the community,” said Goldman Sachs managing director Dino Fusco. “The safety of our employees and the safety of our neighbors in the community is paramount to us.”

Having to face down CB1’s Battery Park City Committee, which hosted Tuesday’s meeting, in the wake of an accident at the tower was not a new experience for Tishman or Goldman Sachs. In April of this year, the companies found themselves explaining how it was that a hammer had slipped from a worker’s tool belt, dropped 18 stories and shattered the rear window of a passing taxi.

“You were very responsive to us at that time, but now that the building is up, I have great concern going near that building,” committee chairwoman Linda Belfer told the rTishman and Goldman Sachs executives. “I’m really afraid.”

Eleven months prior to that incident, the committee demanded to know how a piece of steel managed to fly out of the building, landing in the outfield of the nearby Battery Park City ball fields during a Little League game. In December 2007, an architect was paralyzed after a crane operator accidentally dropped several tons of steel onto the office trailer where he was working. “This incident continues a troubling pattern of accidents at this site,” Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer wrote in a letter to Tishman on November 30. “We cannot allow construction sites in the heart of Lower Manhattan to continue posing safety risks to residents and workers.”

Aside from mucking up traffic and startling nearby residents, Saturday’s accident also thwarted the opening of Battery Bark City’s first ice skating rink, originally set for 10 a.m. that morning. The rink is installed in the Battery Park City ball fields, just a few hundred feet from the tower.

“It shut us down all day Saturday,” said Glen Danischewsky, the rink’s on-site manager. “We were basically in a holding pattern until they deemed the area safe.”

Fusco said Goldman Sachs has offered to compensate Danischewsky for the lost revenue at the skating rink, as well as a local café owner who had planned to sell pastries and hot drinks at the rink on opening day. But given the frequency of the accidents at the company’s new headquarters, committee member Jeff Mihok said Goldman Sachs ought to be doing even more to support the neighborhood, like sponsoring discount passes at the skating rink for Battery Park City residents.

“This is where we live, and this is where [they] have built your huge building,” Mihok said. “It’s what a good neighbor would do, given the number of things we’ve had to put up with from [their] organization.”