Glass From Goldman Sachs Tower Falls on West Street
By Matt Dunning
Allan Tannenbaum / Tribeca Trib
Glass fell from the 38th floor of the Goldman Sachs tower, apparently from the north face of the tower.
It was the fourth reported incident of debris or equipment falling from the building since construction began.
The city’s Department of Buildings stopped all work on the 740-foot tower after pieces of glass apparently fell from a 38th-story window on the northern face of the building, landing on West Street and on a platform inside the construction site, sometime around 7:30 a.m.
A spokesman for Tishman Con struction, the general contractor for the building, said “very high winds” had blown the pieces of previously cracked glass off of the tower. Sustained winds were recorded at 20 miles an hour for most of the afternoon.
No one was injured in the incident, a Department of Buildings spokesman said. Tishman will be required to submit a full review of the tower’s facade before work can resume.
The closure of West Street diverted thousands of cars into the heart of Downtown, causing back-ups in virtually every direction.
It was the latest in a series of frightening accidents for the $2.4 billion office tower, due to be completed early next year. 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. Less than six months later, work was suspended for more than a month after a 30-inch steel panel flew off the tower last May, landing in the outfield of the nearby Battery Park City ball fields during a Little League game.
Then, in April of this year, a carpenter’s hammer plummeted 17 stories from the unfinished tower, smashing the rear window of a passing taxi on Murray Street. No one was injured, but the accident occurred as parents were walking their children to nearby P.S. 89.
Saturday’s accident delayed by a day 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.”
Though they are aware of the potential for accidents near a construction site, Danischewsky said he and his staff didn’t feel any added anxiety when they opened the rink the morning after the incident.
“You’ll always be looking up I guess," he said, "but it was nice to be open and to have people out on the ice on Sunday.”