Parking Lot in East Village Receives Eviction Order Due to Structural Failures

Early in the morning, several construction workers arrived at a parking lot located at 220 9th Street, in the East Village, to inspect the repairs that it needs.

“Clearly it has to be inspected and repaired, but I don’t know about this one because I’ve never seen it,” explained Wilmer, one of the workers.

– But now they come to repair it?

“Supposedly, we come to repair.”

For now, the parking lot is closed to the public as it received an eviction order on Wednesday from the Department of Buildings.

According to inspectors from this city body, the garage has cracks in the concrete, as well as exposed steel beams and damage to the elevators.

The parking lot is owned by the same company that operated the garage at 57 Ann Street, which collapsed several weeks ago in Lower Manhattan, killing one worker.

“They have to rectify that because it is good for everyone, because we all have families and we all have to be careful with that. They have to rectify it because there are engineers for that, to rectify all that”, Armando Orea, construction worker.

The parking lot is one of three that the Department of Buildings ordered the partial or total eviction, because they found unsafe conditions in certain structural parts, which could present a danger to workers, customers and even pedestrians.

The other parking lot is on the Lower East Side, at 148 Madison Street, and the third parking lot to be vacated is located in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, at 1368 Fulton Street.

“We come to see the work, first of all, we do not have instructions on what we are going to do, we do not know, we do not know, we practically inspect to see what it is about, I do not know the work that is going to be done,” said another worker.

To prevent disasters like the one that occurred nearly a month ago, the Department of Buildings is checking every parking lot in the city, looking for structural failures and those that have received tickets or violations and have failed to repair the damage.

In fact, the city has indicated that the owners of these garages have a legal responsibility to keep their private property in perfect condition and that these mandatory inspections will help them comply with the regulations.