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A 7-month-old Manhattan girl and her nanny were pulled from a mountain of debris by several Good Samaritans yesterday after a building being demolished to make way for a high-rise crumbled into a heap on Broadway, officials and witnesses said. The Good Samaritans, a dozen passers-by and construction workers, quickly dug through the rubble with their hands, tossing bricks, wood spiked with nails and pieces of twisted metal to the side. Officials say the building, a 85-year-old, one-story structure that formerly housed a Gristedes between West 99th and 100th streets, collapsed onto scaffolding at 9:25 a.m. "My baby! My baby!" Brunilda Tirado, 56, a baby-sitter, screamed from beneath the rubble that had only seconds earlier rained down on her and girl. "Her immediate instinct was to throw her body over the baby," said Christopher Tirado, 34, who visited his mother at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center yesterday. He noted that the child's stroller, which flipped upside-down to form a cocoon, helped the baby survive with bumps and bruises. "She loves the baby," said Tirado, adding that his mother helped raise her employers' two other children. Brunilda Tirado, who had just left a small store next to the former Gristedes, suffered a broken arm and leg and remained hospitalized in stable condition. In her bed, the son said, "She couldn't speak much because of the morphine, but all she kept asking was, 'Where's the baby? How's the baby?'" The girl, whose name was not released, was listed in stable condition. She "oohed and ahhed" and appeared fine, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said after he visited her. Four other pedestrians, including a 4-year-old boy who later walked into the hospital with his mother and four firefighters, suffered minor injuries, officials said. One injured pedestrian was taken to Harlem Hospital Center with a broken arm and leg. Jeff Rosenthal, who helped other pedestrians pull Tirado and the 7-month-old girl from the debris, said he had just walked under the scaffolding before the collapse. "I heard it start to rumble ... and then just watched the whole thing collapse," he told a local television station. By 10 a.m., hundreds of police, firefighters and emergency workers swarmed the area, shutting down transit service, evacuating nearby buildings and searching under the rubble for hours. No others were found. "This is, of course, a very unfortunate incident, but it could have been much, much worse," Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said at the scene. Scoppetta said the 20-foot-high facade at 2633 Broadway, as well as its roof, buckled in part from the weight of a demolition backhoe that sat on top of it. The city Buildings Department immediately stopped the demolition project, and gave the contractor, Safeway Development Corp., three summonses, a spokeswoman said. The incident struck a nerve in the neighborhood among a group of residents and activists who had been protesting the development of a 31-story building on the property. In a prepared statement, Extell Development Co., which is building the high-rise, said that it had all the proper permits for the work and that its immediate concern was for the injured. "They are central in our thoughts and our prayers," read the statement. It described Safeway as "one of the city's premier union demolition companies." A person who answered the phone at Safeway's Bronx headquarters referred calls to Extell. Jennifer Givner, a spokeswoman for the buildings department, said the summonses were given because Safeway used a different backhoe, of a different make and weight, than agreed upon. She noted that the use of a demolition backhoe on a one-story roof was routine. Investigators will examine Safeway's calculations for weight on the roof, she said. Officials did not say if anyone was in the backhoe at the time, but witnesses said they saw it being operated. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau is also investigating the incident. Hours after the first victims were treated, the 4-year-old boy walked into St. Luke's with minor injuries. A witness at the scene said that the boy had been walking along Broadway with a woman who was also carrying another child in her arms. "She just missed it," said Erving Pearlberg, 74, who said the woman walked into his tax preparation business on West 99th Street amid a cloud of dust. "She called her husband and then she just went home." Staff writer Denisa R. Superville and freelance writer Sabrina Yohannes contributed to this story. 1: Boy, 4, and mother sought shelter here after collapse. Boy treated at nearby hospital 2: Adjacent building where nanny and baby had walked out when Gristedes collapsed. 3: In front of the store, four pedestrians were injured, including 4-year-old Backhoe on roof may have prompted 9:25 a.m. building collapse at 2633 Broadway GRISTEDES BUILDING AT A GLANCE: Year built: 1920 Stories: 1 Square footage: 10,500 Researched By Jeff McMillan, Judy Weinberg and Andrew Wong
Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc
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