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Among them was Erica L. Tishman, 60, a New York architect whose office was a few blocks away.
As Tishman was walking on the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 49th Street, the unimaginable happened. A piece of debris from a 17-story building that, officials said, had recently been fined by the city for its unsafe facade, broke off and tumbled to the ground, hitting Tishman in the head.
By the time emergency responders arrived, minutes after being called at about 10:45 a.m., she was dead, the police said. No other people were injured.
While the authorities have not said what hit her, an inspection by the Department of Buildings after the accident found cracks in the building’s facade and terra cotta pieces missing.
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The department fined the building’s owner in April because the terra cotta was coming apart and at risk of falling. On Tuesday, the city ordered the owner to immediately install a sidewalk shed to protect pedestrians, and work had started on it by late afternoon.
The death left onlookers shaken. A crowd of several dozen people stood nearby as officials placed a white sheet over her body amid steady rainfall.
“I walk down that street all the time,” said Darrell Wright, an employee at Barclays, the bank, which has offices across from where the woman was hit. He saw the aftermath of the accident from his office window. “I take that street to get to the subway. It makes you nervous.”
Tishman, whose identity was confirmed by police Tuesday, was a lifelong New Yorker and a Park Avenue socialite, who volunteered for several institutions.
She was a vice president at Zubatkin Owner Representation, a project management firm, and a former chair of the board of directors at Educational Alliance, a social services agency on the Lower East Side, according to her company biography. She also served on the board of trustees at the Riverdale Country School and at Central Synagogue in Manhattan.
Born Erica Lindenbaum, she attended the Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, then Princeton University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1982, she married Steven Tishman, who is now a managing director at Houlihan Lokey, an investment bank. The couple has three children. She received an architecture license in New York in 1988.
“She was just simply indefatigable,” said Alan van Capelle, the chief executive officer of the Educational Alliance. “She had a photographic memory and could recall a conversation that took place three years ago. She understood all the lines in the budget, and wasn’t afraid to ask her friends for money to support the causes she cared about.”
“Erica’s friendship and wise counsel will be deeply missed,” said Dominic A.A. Randolph, the head of school at Riverdale Country School.
A woman who picked up the phone at the Tishmans’ Park Avenue apartment said that she had no comment.
Though Tishman collapsed in front of a noodle restaurant at 152 W. 49th St., the Department of Buildings said that its initial investigation found that the falling debris had come from the neighboring building, 729 Seventh Ave., a 17-story office building with retail shops on the first floor.
A Department of Buildings spokeswoman, Abigail Kunitz, said that an investigation into the accident was ongoing, adding that “no pedestrian should be at risk from dangerous facade conditions.”
In April, inspectors at the Department of Buildings had issued a violation to the building’s owner, Himmel + Meringoff Properties, because of a “failure to maintain exterior building facade,” according to city records.
Inspectors found that terra cotta above the 15th floor was damaged and at risk of falling and injuring people on the street. The owners later paid a $1,250 fine in connection with the violation, which was listed as a Class 1 ticket, the highest level of severity.
In late November, the building, which was originally constructed around 1915, received approval to begin masonry repair work on its facade, according to city records. The building’s management told the city in November that it planned to install scaffolding up to 150 feet tall for the repairs. The scaffolding had not been installed as of Tuesday morning.
Himmel + Meringoff owns 12 commercial buildings in Manhattan, among other holdings. Most of them are in Midtown.
“We are saddened by this tragedy and our hearts go out to the family,” the company said in a statement. “The company will fully cooperate with the city in the ongoing matter.”
Himmel + Meringoff appears to have a pattern of facade-related violations. At another building the company owns, at 521 W. 57th St. in Midtown, the city issued a $500 fine in 2017 for issues with the facade. Inspectors found damaged stucco and bricks on it, as well as eroded mortar around the masonry. While the company paid the fine, the violation remains open, according to city records.
At 400 Eighth Ave. in Chelsea, the company paid a $2,500 fine it received in April 2018 for cracks in part of that building’s exterior walls. It paid another $500 fine earlier this year after it failed to submit to a routine technical review of the building’s exterior walls, as required by city law.
State Sen. Brad Hoylman, who represents the Times Square area, said that the company should have installed a sidewalk shed or scaffolding around 729 Seventh Ave. once it was cited for a facade violation. Doing so, he said, could have prevented Tishman’s death.
“We hear, in our office, annoyance about sidewalk sheds,” Hoylman said. “The other side of the coin is that they actually protect people from falling debris. This is a tragedy that could have been averted if they had followed the law. I hope the landlord has the book thrown at him.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .