The city’s Department of Buildings has hired a private engineer to study last year’s collapse of a Lower Manhattan parking garage, which resulted in the death of the garage’s manager and raised alarm bells over the structural integrity of New York’s aging building stock.
Lera Consulting Structural Engineers will be paid just shy of $1 million to comprehensively study what caused the garage at 57 Ann St. to collapse in April 2023. The engineering firm will document “structural and foundational elements” at the site of the garage, which was fully demolished after the collapse, and review historical records before compiling a bulky report on how exactly the garage was able to come down as it did.
