These 124 Queens Buildings Have Unsafe Facades, Data Shows

QUEENS, NY — At least 100 buildings in Queens have crumbling facades that pose a serious safety threat to pedestrians, according to an analysis of city data by The New York Times and Patch.

They include clusters of buildings at the Astoria Houses, Woodside Houses, Bland Houses and Baisley Park Houses, all public housing complexes run by NYCHA.

In one square block of Jackson Heights, building inspectors identified six addresses with unsafe facades.

A 21-story building in the Bay Club, a luxury condo complex in Bayside, was found to have unsafe facades and railings during an inspection on July 16, 2019, building department records show.

The agency ordered the building's owner to make repairs within 90 days, then granted extensions until March 4, 2020, but Bay Club manager Michael Brennan told Patch they've done all the needed repairs and are waiting for city's inspectors to take another look.

"Whatever the city told us to do, we've did," Brennan said, adding that he expects the scaffolding at the building, 2 Bay Club Drive, to come down next month.

The Department of Buildings did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Of the 1,400-plus buildings with facade violations that were identified by The New York Times in a new data analysis released Thursday, 124 of those are in Queens.

The Times' analysis found city landlords are routinely ignoring millions of dollars in fines over unsafe facades and failing to make necessary repairs. The consequences can be deadly.

Last month, falling debris from a crumbling facade in Midtown Manhattan killed 60-year-old architect Erica Tishman.

City inspectors had written up the building for "damaged terra cotta" that "poses a falling hazard for pedestrians" months before and ordered the owner to pay a $1,250 fine and put up a sidewalk shed.

When the sidewalk shed finally appeared, it was hours after Tishman's death, The Times reported.

The Department of Buildings has since added 12 staffers to its dedicated facade inspection team, bringing the total to 22 members. The agency also plans to issue higher fines for facade conditions, according to The Times.

In the days after Tishman's death, the agency conducted surprise inspections of 1,330 buildings it had deemed unsafe, The Times reported; inspectors found 220 buildings with no pedestrian protections, like sidewalk sheds and netting.

The city started its systematic inspection of facades after a piece of falling concrete hit and killed a Barnard student in 1979. But critics have accused the agency of lax enforcement, arguing that its fines are too low and that the agency could employ more tools to punish landlords for ignoring violations.

Now, the Department of Buildings is starting to bring charges against building owners whose sidewalk sheds have been up for years — something meant to be a temporary protection while facades are repaired.

“We’re taking aggressive action so that these owners make the needed repairs to their buildings, so that these sheds can be taken down," Department of Buildings commissioner Melanie La Rocca told The Times.

See all the Queens buildings with facade violations, as compiled by Patch based on a data analysis by The New York Times: