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The City’s Department of Buildings (DOB) has labelled seven parking garages in Lower Manhattan as “unsafe,” and fined 59 others $1,000 for failing to submit the legally required documents attesting to a recent inspection by an engineer. For the purposes of this analysis, Lower Manhattan is defined as being within the borders of Community District 1 (CD1), bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge.
The seven garages deemed “unsafe” within this catchment are at 225 Rector Place, 333 Rector Place, 75 Wall Street, 71 Reade Street, 23 Beekman Street, 13 South Street, and 10 South William Street. The garage at 170 Park Row, just outside the CD1 boundary, is also classified as unsafe. A designation of “unsafe” carries with it the requirement that the operator repair the conditions leading to the citation within 90 days, or else face closure.
Another ten have been classified as “safe with repairs and/or engineering monitoring,” which denotes serious structural deficiencies, but also indicates permission from DOB to continue operating, pending work to mitigate these issues. These are located at 325 North End Avenue, 250 Vesey Street, Two River Terrace, 34 River Terrace, 157 Hudson Street, 101 Duane Street, 95 Wall Street, 28 Old Slip, 15 William Street, and One York Street.
A total of 59 garages have been cited for failure to file a report from a qualified engineer attesting to their structural conditions by the December 31 deadline. (This number represents slightly more than half of the 107 parking garages operating in Lower Manhattan.) According to DOB, each of these garages has been fined $1,000, and will face the same fine monthly throughout 2024, with an additional $5,000 fine at the end of this year for any garage that remains out of compliance.
Only 20 local parking garages within CD1 were certified as safe, while another 13 are classified as “status pending,” meaning that they have filed the required paperwork, but that it is still being reviewed by DOB.
The DOB’s push for structural inspections at parking facilities follows the partial collapse last April of a garage on Ann Street in the Financial District, which killed one worker and led to the demolition of the building.
Click here for a DOB map and zoom in to Lower Manhattan to see color-coded dots showing locations of parking structures that are safe, unsafe, status pending, etc.
Matthew Fenton
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