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February 15, 2007

Rolling The Ball

After the fire last October, the Department of Buildings decided that they were done letting Arthur flout their regulations in the name of art, and came down on him with the full force of the law. While they may have acted a bit heavy-handedly when they had the police department drag him away in handcuffs, they acted well within their directives with the issuance of a number of unsafe building violations. The lack of fire stairs and the lack of egress on each floor due to large piles of debris were clearly violations of the building code.









Other parts of their mandate against Arthur were more puzzling. While the stop work order instructing him to cease all work on the distinctive wooden structure at the top of the building was understandable, he hadn't actually built anything new up there in a few years. Furthermore, the DOBs insistance that they would show up with cranes and raze as much of the building as they deemed necessary if the top structure wasn't removed right away was a strange reaction to the building not having fire stairs or egress. Their claim that the top structure was going to blow off and kill someone not only had little basis in fact, but they didn't even bother to issue an unsafe building violation for it. If New York's brutal winter gales hadn't destroyed the structure during the years it had been there, the odds of it blowing away without many more years of deterioration were pretty low.

Part of Arthur's argument when he was able to get the criminal case against him dismissed was that no engineer from the DOB had ever stepped foot inside the building, and two separate engineers that inspected the building pro bono declared that the structure was in no imminent danger of collapse. Regardless, what Arthur and I both learned from his arrest and subsequent exculpation was that the DOB can act first and admit they were wrong later (I had actually insisted that the DOB wouldn't physically remove him from the house after he received the vacate order). While their strategy of act first and shrug later might be the grounds for a lawsuit, they could have potentially leveled the entire building when they came to remove the top structure, particularly since the strongest ECBs were against issues on the lower floors.

In order to guarantee that this wouldn't happen, we had to convince the DOB that we were serious about removing the top structure ourselves. This would allow us to save as much of the building as possible. With the help of Tish James' office as a negotiator, we put together a timeline for the work to be done. The first few weeks of this timeline are compised of debris removal, shoring or replacement of floor joists, installation of a subfloor where it has been removed, and the construction of temporary internal stairs. When all of that is completed, we will build our scaffolding and begin removing the top structure the way it was built - from the inside.

On Thursday, February 8th, we attempted to have our first 30 yard container delivered into the lot next door to Broken Angel. The delivery truck tried for 45 minutes to angle his way into the lot, but with Downing street so narrow and cars parked on the opposite side of the street, there was no safe way in. We had to take most of our workers off of the site and come back the next day. Friday, the street scaffold went up, and the street cleaning rules made it much easier to get a container into the site. We were one day ahead of our proposed schedule with the DOB, and we were able to remove 30 cubic yards of debris. We ran into the same problem again on Monday the 12th. Cars blocked the driveway all morning, and we weren't able to get the container traded out or the two new ones delivered. With this experience in mind, it became apparent that we were going to have to take a different approach to the debris removal.

The economics of debris removal work out like this: A good price for the delivery and removal of a 30 cubic yard container is around $850. A crew of workers can fill roughly two 30 yard containers a day, depending on how packed the debris is that needs to be removed. With a daily payroll of $1,600 for the workers, it costs roughly $3,300 per 60 cubic yards of debris to be removed. If a clean-out company is hired, their price can range from $1,100 - $1,500 per 20 yard container removed by their workers. If a deal is made for a specific amount of debris removal work within a certain amount of time on a particular job, you can often cut a better deal. We have worked out a deal with a clean-out company that is roughly equivalent in price per 60 cubic yards of debris removed with our workers removing the debris and having to deal with container delivery. We also have the added layer of protection of the clean-out company's liability insurance on top of our own. As of 5:00 PM on Wednesday the 14th, we had removed a total of 150 cubic yards of mixed debris, and 20 cubic yards of metal for recycling. At the close of business on Thursday the 15th, we had removed an additional 40 cubic yards of mixed debris, 7 cubic yards of broken bricks, and 15 cubic yards of metal for recycling.

Posted by broken angel at February 15, 2007 9:22 AM

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