Brooklyn building collapse: A look at other NYC structural emergencies in recent years

At least eight people have died after a three-story building in Brooklyn collapsed at the edge of a construction site, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Thursday.

The building came down Wednesday afternoon.

Emergency workers continue to search the rubble and debris for signs of life and to recover any victim. As it stands now, at least 19 people were hurt, some of them critically. Children are among the victims.

The tragedy is just the latest for a city that has seen its fair share of buildings collapsing or buildings facing structural emergencies. Although a rare event, relatively speaking, New York City has seen a handful of similar situation in recent years.

Here’s a look back at just some of the most recent building collapses and structural emergencies that shook the city to its core.

Nov. 10, 2026: Brooklyn apartment building

The building that collapsed was a three-story building with a business on the ground floor and multiple apartments inside. It was located next to an excavation site where a one-story building had previously stood before being fully demolished in 2025.

According to city records, excavation at this site began in September. That work includes blasting rock.

It is unclear what exactly caused the building to collapse, whether it was an issue with that building itself or whether work at the excavation site led to the tragedy unfolding. While the investigation into the cause was far from complete, documents filed by the property owner suggest structural conditions of the building that collapsed were not ideal — and excavation of the kind that was going on next door is always sensitive.

July 7, 2026: Former Pfizer global headquarters

This summer, two structural support beams on the 21st floor of a 37-story under-construction building in Manhattan started buckling on a July morning, triggering mass evacuations, street closures and a large emergency response.

Raw footage from inside, taken by a construction worker, shows an entire floor-full of badly bent steel beams. At least nine neighboring buildings were evacuated as a precaution.

The structural emergency halted work on one of the nation’s largest office-to-apartment conversions, while highlighting the complex engineering behind adaptive reuse projects that have become popular as a way for officials try to tackle a nationwide housing shortage by transforming offices that have sat underused since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The building, formerly part of Pfizer’s global headquarters, is being converted into a 1,500-unit luxury rental complex. The plans call for turning two office buildings — one built in 1909, the other in the 1960s — into about 1,600 apartments by adding more than a dozen stories atop the older structure and redesigning and expanding the other.

The old Pfizer building will be repaired 1/64th of an inch at a time, or about the width of a credit card.

Oct. 1, 2025: NYCHA Mitchel Houses

An explosion at a Bronx apartment building in October of last year blew off a massive chimney that ran up the side of the high-rise, leaving residents to wait for clearance to return to their apartments as officials investigate what caused the blast.

A plume of dust covered the block in the aftermath of the explosion Wednesday morning, which left a huge pile of bricks around the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) building’s base and on a nearby playground.

The building stood with a 20-story gash in its side.

Amazingly, no injuries or deaths were reported in the collapse of the chimney, which vents exhaust from the boiler room that provides heat to the Bronx building.

Residents reported hearing a blast just after 8 a.m. Investigators were trying to determine if there was a gas leak or whether something else triggered the explosion, Mayor Eric Adams said. The mayor noted that Oct. 1 is typically the first day that heating systems are turned on for the season.

April 18, 2023: Manhattan parking garage

The shocking scene unfolded in the Financial District in the middle of an April afternoon in 2023, sending ashy debris clouds into the air on Ann Street as the top floor of the five-story structure caved all the way to the bottom. Screams for help could be heard in one witness video, while footage from a nearby building captured the aftermath of the disaster.

The victims were all in the building, working, at the time of the collapse, investigators said. The manager of the parking garage, 59-year-old Willis Morris, was killed when the rubble from the upper floors came crashing down inside his office on the second floor. His body was recovered from the scene late Wednesday night.

Five others were taken to a hospital.

A day after the tragedy, investigators looking into the lower Manhattan parking garage said that initial findings indicated the age of the building and the number of vehicles parked on the roof deck contributed to the disaster, according to investigators.

The Ann Street garage — which was originally constructed in 1925 — obtained its certificate of occupancy in 1957. That certificate allowed for five or more cars to be on each floor — and footage from Tuesday’s collapse showed well more than that on each level. As many as 50 cars may have been parked on the top roof level alone, with 80 to 90 vehicles inside in total.

December 11, 2023: NYCHA Billingsley Terrace partial collapse

Part of a seven-story residential building in the Bronx collapsed in late 2023, leaving apartments exposed and walls sheared off as firefighters searched a heaping pile of debris through the evening for any victims who may have been trapped underneath, officials said.

Miraculously, even though debris topped 12 feet high in some spots, according to the FDNY at the time, no one was severely injured, although two people ended with minor injuries.

It was later found that the building had been issued a summons related to the structural integrity of its sidewalk shed, according to a summons issued the month before the partial collapse.

Specifically, on the morning of Nov. 3, 2023, the Department of Buildings inspector raised concerns about mudsills, the wooden or metal platforms that sit under scaffolding columns and distribute weight.

The inspector wrote, “I observed there are deteriorated and broken mudsills with inadequate support for vertical members throughout,” according to a copy of the violation posted online. The inspector added that there was “1 vertical member with missing mudsill which can compromise the structural stability causing a potential collapse.”

It was not clear at the time if the sidewalk shed collapsed under the weight of the facade rubble – or if the scaffolding became unstable first, pulling parts of the wall down. It is also not clear if in the report from November, the inspector was talking about a “potential collapse” of the scaffolding or the building itself.