A three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn fell into the excavation next door on Wednesday afternoon. Eight people are dead, six adults and two children. Eighteen more were hurt, four of them firefighters. The FDNY ended its search Thursday afternoon with no one left to find.
Flatbush is one of the Brooklyn neighborhoods where Black New Yorkers and Caribbean families have built their lives. About 46,300 of the 154,853 people in its community district are Black, according to Data USA’s 2024 figures, and Haiti is the most common birthplace among its foreign-born residents. When a building comes down on this block, it comes down on them. The families who lived, worked and shopped in it are now being housed at the Flatbush YMCA. The city has ordered three neighboring buildings, 1323, 1325 and 1327 Flatbush, vacated.
The lot at 2625 Bedford Avenue was being cleared for a mixed-use development, a grocery store under eight stories of apartments. The city’s own records show the site had been in trouble before. The Department of Buildings found in March that demolition was under way without adequate overhead protection. It fined the demolition contractor, N Tech Design of America, $2,500. In April, the contractor was fined $10,000 for working in violation of a stop-work order. The order was lifted in May. The building that fell was nearly 100 years old, and an architect told 6sqft that foundations like its rubble one “can ‘fall apart’ when an excavation takes place.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Thursday that the Department of Buildings will inspect about 100 other construction sites linked to the five entities involved in the Bedford Avenue project. “If there is anyone or any entity operating in this city that bears responsibility for what happened, we will hold them fully accountable,” he said. The Department of Buildings and law enforcement are investigating, and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office is involved. No cause has been announced and no one has been charged.
The inspections are the right move, and they come after the deaths, not before them. A $10,000 fine for ignoring a stop-work order is a cost a developer can absorb. It did not stop the work, and it did not protect the people next door. The people who pay for that gap are the tenants in old buildings beside new projects, in neighborhoods where the city has long been slow to act on complaints.
What happens next is the test. The city says it will share what it finds. The families of the eight dead, and the residents now sleeping at the YMCA, should get the investigation’s findings in full, and a prosecutor’s answer on whether anyone is criminally responsible.
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