It was a alarming wake-up call Monday for some in Tribeca, after chunks of stone and stucco fell from a high-rise building and came crashing down onto the street below.
Pieces of fallen façade that came off a commercial building on Broadway between Duane and Reade streets could still be seen sprawled out on the pavement and on top of cars late Monday afternoon, with the street still closed off.
The 19-story building had a permit for façade repairs with scaffolding and protective netting covering the outside. But somehow, the city’s Department of Buildings (DOB) says pieces of the building’ decorative exterior fell from the 15th and 16th floors after 6 a.m., knocking down more of the façade from the fifth floor.
It all tore through protective netting and fell onto parked cars below. But fortunately, and incredibly, no one was hurt.
Stephen LeBron heard the commotion as he approached the intersection with his two young kids, and was later relieved they weren’t in harms way.
“I heard like click, click, click, then as I was walking on the sidewalk I seen all the debris on the ground and I put two and two together, like obviously this came from up there,” he said. “From that height you could drop something as simple as a baseball and it could kill somebody.”
Police barricaded parts of the busy intersection throughout the day Monday to keep pedestrians and cars away, as crews on site worked to assess the damage and secure the façade to prevent any further collapses.
According to DOB records, the building has an open violation from January related to cracked stucco and missing bricks on upper floors. It was not known if that was the reason for the ongoing façade work, or if it contributed to the collapse Monday.
The owners of the building have had a sidewalk shed up for years, with façade inspections dating back to 2012 — indicating unsafe conditions, according to a DOB source. There had been multiple inspections in recent months, the source told NBC New York, with multiple violations piling up over the years.
Inspections in Oct. 2025 and another in March found that the contractor responsible for the scaffolding, NOVA Construction Services, did not have the debris netting fully secured to the supported scaffold, the DOB source said. However, it wasn’t clear whether that was related in any way to Monday’s façade collapse.
Crews were at the scene figuring out the next steps to take. It wasn’t clear how long the sidewalks and streets around the building would stay closed.
