The Click of Falling Bricks: A Building’s Shocking Collapse

Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll get details on the building collapse in Brooklyn. We’ll also find out about a vote in the City Council to end what is known as surveillance pricing, which uses algorithms to charge different customers different prices for the same item.

The decision, grim as it was, came not quite 24 hours after the collapse of a building in Brooklyn — the decision, in the cold, hard rain of Thursday afternoon, to call off the search-and-rescue effort. Officials said there were no more victims in the rubble.

It was a sudden end to a search effort that fire officials had said earlier would probably continue for days. By then the death toll had risen to eight, including two children, and at least 18 people had been injured, including four firefighters, city officials said.

“There are no words for a loss of this magnitude,” Mayor Zohran Mamdani had said on social media earlier in the day. Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York called the collapse “absolutely, absolutely” heart-wrenching.

It remains unclear why the building collapsed. It went down in a rumbling cloud of splintered wood and twisted metal — “white debris, like smoke,” said Meir Ballas, who watched from the telephone store across the street, where he works. The three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue contained four apartments.

“It went click, click, click, click, click” as the bricks began falling, said James Williams, who works in a deli across the street and went outside around 4 p.m. Wednesday. Benewaa Bonsu, a neighbor who had been walking by, also heard the noise. “I thought it was gunshots at first,” she said.

The front of the building slid away. The side went down, too. A check-cashing shop on the first floor disappeared as the rest of the building crumbled, taking with it the wall of a building next door. Suddenly tenants’ private spaces were open to the world. In one closet there was a line of jackets and shirts. In a bedroom there was a mound of clothes piled on a bed with pink sheets.

The wreckage landed in the lot next door, where excavation for a new building had been going on. As the haze cleared, Ballas said, construction workers were holding their heads in their hands, as if in disbelief and shock.

Firefighters arrived in a minute, officials said, and before long hundreds of emergency workers were scouring the pile of rubble.

The rescue operation expanded to involve dogs, drones and helicopters alongside excavation machinery. The rescuers worked into the night on Wednesday and through the day on Thursday as relatives and friends of the missing waited nearby or at a Y.M.C.A. on Flatbush Avenue that became a hub for people seeking information.

Among them was Leanor Yupa, hoping for word of her 22-year-old son, Gabriel Siguencia, an Ecuadorean immigrant who had started working as a carpenter at the site two weeks ago. She screamed and fell to her knees when she learned that he was among the dead.

Later the consul general of Ecuador, Gicela Andrade, who had been at a staging area near the scene, accompanied Yupa to meet with detectives. Andrade said that at least one other Ecuadorean had been identified among the victims. Mamdani said that those killed and injured in the collapse had also come from Colombia, Mexico and Trinidad.

The mayor promised “a full and thorough” investigation of the collapse. He also said that he was “incredibly troubled” that construction had continued next door — where developers have submitted paperwork for a nine-story building — after an inspection in March found cracks in one wall of the collapsed building. He said that the city would hold anyone responsible for unsafe conditions “fully accountable.”

City records suggested that there had been concern about the condition of the collapsed building, which dated to 1930. The inspection in March, commissioned by the contractors and filed with the Department of Buildings, said that the north facade of the collapsed building was in “poor condition with noticeable cracks.” Demolition of the single-story building that used to occupy the site was stopped after the agency found that there was inadequate protection for nearby properties. The order halting demolition was lifted in August after the Buildings Department concluded that the issues had been corrected.

The buildings adjacent to the one that collapsed were ordered vacated, and the vacate orders remained in effect on Thursday. People who lived in other nearby buildings and were temporarily displaced were allowed to go home, the mayor said.

Weather

Expect a breezy and rainy day, with high near 47. Look for cloudy conditions and possible rain tonight, as temperatures drop around 39.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Nov. 26 (Thanksgiving Day).

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“For too often, entering a shelter derails a child’s education.” — Jennifer Pringle, a project director at Advocates for Children of New York, which calculated that about one in eight schoolchildren in New York City lacked stable housing last year, even though the number of homeless students dropped 16,000 from the year before.

The latest New York news

Child care workers: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plan for universal child care relies on tens of thousands of workers who are among the lowest paid in New York City. The mayor pledged to raise their pay, bringing it closer to the salaries of public school teachers. But doing so will require more state funding.
Insider trading: Chetram Balli, a document processor at the prestigious law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, was charged with insider trading after prosecutors said he used his access to confidential information about upcoming mergers and acquisitions to make about $70,000 in illicit profits off the trades. If convicted, Balli faces up to 20 years in prison.
Commuting between New Jersey and Manhattan: Crossing the Hudson River on a weekday this fall has required planning, patience and, sometimes, luck. But the next few weeks, months and, yes, years could test the patience of even the most seasoned riders, as transit officials from both states advance a number of major construction projects at the same time.
Vote for your favorite Metropolitan Diary illustration: In celebration of the Metropolitan Diary’s 50th anniversary this week, Agnes Lee, the column’s illustrator, picked five drawings she is especially proud of. Vote for your favorite.

City Council moves to block surveillance pricing

The City Council said no to surveillance pricing.

Surveillance pricing involves setting prices with an algorithm so that some customers pay more than others for the same package of brownie bars or the same bottle of juice. On Thursday the City Council approved a ban on the practice, sometimes called variable pricing. The vote was 44 to 5.

Julie Menin, the Council speaker and main sponsor of the bill, said that charging different customers different prices was “unethical” and worsened the affordability crisis.

But consumers may not notice much difference at the checkout, especially online, because usually they can’t compare the prices they are charged with the prices that algorithm-driven apps deal out to other people.

The bill calls for retailers to be fined $1,000 for each violation. Small businesses could appeal, a provision not included in a bill banning surveillance pricing that the State Legislature passed earlier in the year. Gov. Kathy Hochul has not signed it.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a statement that he supported the City Council measure. “New Yorkers’ personal data should never be used as a weapon against their own pocketbooks,” he said.

Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey have enacted similar laws, as has Seattle. Tom McBrien, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an internet privacy nonprofit, said that dozens of other states are expected to introduce measures to block surveillance pricing in legislative sessions next year, prompted by concerns about the cost of living and the rising backlash against tech overreach.

Josh Gold, a spokesman for Uber, whose Uber Eats service enables restaurants to offer targeted discounts and promotions based on what users search for and leave behind in digital shopping carts, said small businesses would be hurt by the ban. Gold said that an Italian restaurant could no longer offer a coupon to a customer who used the Uber app to look for Italian food.

METROPOLITAN diary