In recent weeks workers have cleaned out the long-vacant (four years!) storefront on the SW corner of Second Avenue and 10th Street... prompting some speculation of a new retail tenant.
Turns out the landlord was sprucing up the space for a new suitor, as "for lease by owner" signs are now up in the windows.
Yesterday's post on the stairwell collapse at 159 Second Ave. that left "30 collegiate partygoers" ("rooftop ragers" per the Daily News) stranded on the roof brought out a lot of comments/emails about other similar rooftop bashes in the neighborhood... maybe to epidemic proportions? Hard to say!
Per one reader:
I live on 12th Street, and the NYU kids who lives upstairs had their own rooftop rager a couple of weeks ago. My poor super had to come put a stop to it. He estimated there were 100 kids on the roof of our tenement building. Not only are they disturbing everyone, they are risking their lives.
Our building is old, and I am hardly an engineer, but I doubt our roof was made to hold all that weight. Plus, there aren't any railings, and someone, especially someone who is tipsy, could easily fall over the edge, which is probably about a foot or so high.
Anyway, it sucks for the rest of the us tenants as well as the supers on our block who are basically resident assistants now, forced to get up all hours of the night to babysit these out-of-control children. My building, once full of people who looked out for each other and took care not to disturb each other, is a dorm now, and I don't want to be back in college!
Have any other rooftop rager stories to share? Hit us up!
As for that stairwell collapse at 159 Second Ave. ... the Postreports today that a "drunken NYU teaching assistant crashed through three marble landings while trying to jump the stairs," according to unnamed authorities.
“The guy jumped. He broke through a couple of landings,” said a source with the city’s Office of Emergency Management, which had video of the 1:30 a.m. stunt gone awry.
A friend who lives in the building said Niu, a student at NYU’s prestigious Stern School of Business, “was barely moving” after his fall.
“[He] was definitely a little intoxicated and probably stumbled down,” the friend said.
Friends of the NYU TA said that he weighs roughly 150 pounds.
“I have no idea what kind of weight [the staircase is] supposed to sustain,” an OEM source said. “But, obviously, it was not being used normally. It was jumped on by a grown man from 10 to 12 feet in the air.”
Meanwhile, the missing sections of the stairwell stranded about 40 students on the roof. The student reportedly suffered broken ribs and a fractured ankle. Authorities are continuing to investigate the cause of the collapse, per the Post.
A rooftop rager dissolved into a rescue mission in the East Village early Sunday morning, when a stairway platform crumbled, leaving one man seriously injured after he plunged two stories and trapping more than 30 collegiate partygoers on the roof, authorities said.
Over 30 college-aged revelers had gathered on the roof of 159 2nd Avenue at E. 9 St. in the lower East Side on Saturday night for a moonlit soiree, witnesses said.
Also, the building is at East 10th Street, not 9th Street per the Daily News.
The injured student is in critical but stable condition at Bellevue.
And the reaction from the assembled revelers?
"We were having a party, just a bunch of people hanging out ... Some guy runs upstairs and says, 'Everyone quiet down, everyone shut the f--k up , someone might have died,'" said Martin Barshai, 20, a film student at New York University.
According to WABC 7: "Officials say the building has a lot of college aged students in the building that do a lot of 'partying.'"