World

Unseen and Often Unsafe, They Build New York City

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll learn how New York Times journalists investigated a hair-raising tale of three workers killed in an unusual string of construction accidents in the Bronx, and then told it with tenderness. Also, we’ve noticed a run of eyebrow-raising innovations by thieves; we’ll tally some surprising targets and techniques.

Credit…Daniele Volpe for The New York Times

“The floor seems to vanish.”

It started with just a few paragraphs in The Daily News in May 2021.

A construction-site elevator had plummeted with two workers inside, the bare-bones item said. One died. One lived. Our colleague Dan Barry read it and thought, “There’s gotta be more to it.”

There was.

A “fairly rudimentary check,” Dan recalls, revealed that the death was the third on the same site in less than three years — an extraordinarily bad safety record.

An odyssey through city records eventually revealed to Dan what became the investigative backbone of “The Men Lost to 20 Bruckner Boulevard,” a powerful piece that, if you didn’t catch it over the weekend, you should read.

Three workers with little to protect them — two undocumented immigrants and a homeless man — lost their lives in accidents at the nonunion building site. It was the most at a single site since at least 2003, when city records end, and possibly since the construction of the much larger World Trade Center.

Why the deaths continued, Dan says, is inexplicable on one hand and obvious on the other: The workers have no leverage and few options. Inspectors are stretched thin; fines for safety violations can be easily absorbed by developers. The attitude at job sites, especially those where workers do not belong to unions, is: “Just get the job done.”

So he and Karen Zraick decided to explore a deeper, more elusive question: Who are the workers walking scaffoldings without safety gear, in Manhattan or Flushing, Queens, or the Bronx?

As Dan puts it: “Sometimes people walk by and they don’t even see these people. They’re building your city, and when they die, not even The New York Times will note their deaths.”

Here’s what he told me about how he and his fellow reporters tracked down the men’s families and a key survivor, and why:

First, our colleague Annie Correal, and then Karen, did all they could to learn about Marc Martinez, 18, whose death, from being crushed in a mechanical lift, was only reported in his home country, Ecuador. That meant knocking on doors, finding a friend of the family, an aborted Gofundme page, and finally the family, who’d spent their savings to smuggle him north. We were lucky to have resources to send Daniele Volpe, a photojournalist, to stay with the family in Gunag, their village in Ecuador, to document their daily life and ask questions about Marco.

They also located a roommate of Mauricio Sánchez, 41, a foreman who died in the elevator crash, found his brother’s name and eventually talked to his mother in Mexico. Karen went to the men’s shelter where Michael Daves had lived until he died after falling through a hole. And through court papers they found his mother.

But our real guide, our Virgil through this world, was Yonin Pineda. I reached out through his lawyer, and we had three long interviews. He’s the one who told us details like Sánchez playing the guitar.

He, too, was undocumented and knew what it meant to work a nonunion job and maybe feel that very present, lingering sense of vulnerability and not being completely comfortable with where you are, being taken advantage of as a worker.

And he puts you in that freaking elevator. What’s that like? The horror of an elevator collapse. The nightmarish feel of what it might be like.

You want the reader in that elevator.


Weather

Temps will be near the high 60s, with a chance of showers and thunderstorms persisting throughout the day and night. In the evening, temperatures remain steady in the low 60s.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Monday (Shavuot).


The latest New York news

Credit…Jose A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times

Local news

  • Q23 woes: The Q23 is one of the slowest buses in Queens, where many residents live beyond the subway’s reach and more people ride buses than anywhere else in New York City.

  • Albany’s legislative session: State lawmakers are racing to put finishing touches on a range of legislation. Here’s a look at five of the most contentious issues facing lawmakers in their final week of the session.

  • Crypto in the city: Cryptocurrency firms have been setting up or expanding office space in New York, but recent market turbulence could hamper their longevity.

Mass shootings and coronavirus deaths

  • The value of life: The mountain of calamities, and the paralysis over how to overcome it, points to a nation struggling over some fundamental questions: How much do we value a single life? Is there not a toll that is too high?

  • Violent images never seen: Frustrated Americans ask whether the release of graphic photos of gun violence would lead to better policy. But which photos, and who decides?

Arts & Culture

  • Ode to Bed-Stuy: The choreographer Jordan Demetrius Lloyd has made dances for black box theaters and dances on film. Now, he is doing something to honor his neighborhood.

  • Rodents run rampant: Gothamist reported on how the city is “losing the rat battle.”


On thieves’ shopping lists: Gucci outfits. A church tabernacle. Bulletproof vests.

Credit…Dave Sanders for The New York Times

There is new news on one of the city’s most remarkable recent thefts, that of a gold tabernacle that is the sacred centerpiece of St. Augustine’s Church in Brooklyn.

The security cameras in the church were not working, our colleagues Ali Watkins and Sean Piccoli report, when someone removed the heavy relic. The police valued it at $2 million in the secular sense, but the church’s pastor, Father Frank Tumino, called it “priceless,” since it contains the history of the parish and, for believers, the presence of Christ.

The reason for the lapse in security monitoring is also why the theft hits especially hard.

“Understand: These parishes have been decimated,” Father Tumino said.

“These parishes need between $10 million and $15 million worth of work,” he added. “I’ve been entrusted with doing that, and there is not that money available, so you have to choose what you can pick and do now.”

It was perplexing how the thieves planned to profit from such a rare item, which, like a famous painting, would be hard to sell without attracting attention.

The theft is just the latest in a series of brazen or innovative acts of stealing to hit the city.

  • Last week, our colleague Chelsia Rose Marcius reported, a Queens man was charged with running a kind of Instacart operation for black marketeers.

    The authorities said Roni Rubinov, 42, led a group of 41 people who at his direction stole $3.8 million worth of retail goods from Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Sephora. The thieves made off with high-end cosmetics and skin-care products, Gucci clothing and even a gold Jimmy Choo handbag, to be sold at Mr. Rubinov’s Manhattan pawnshops.

  • Earlier in May, security cameras captured several men lugging oddly heavy-looking black trash bags into vans on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Inside, NBC New York reported, were 400 bulletproof vests that had been donated to help Ukraine’s fight against Russia’s invasion.

    The vests, donated by local law enforcement agencies, were supposed to go to medics and humanitarian workers. Instead, men in colorful sweatsuits walked casually into the nonprofit where the gear had been collected, the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, and carried them out into waiting vans.

    The police traced the thieves to Brooklyn, but are still searching for the vests.

    “People right now in our community, they’re either in church praying, or everyone is feeling disenfranchised,” Andrij Dobriansky, a spokesman for the committee, said. “They have no power right now, and then this happens, and that absolutely affects people.”

METROPOLITAN diary

To go

Dear Diary:

I was at a deli on Morris Park Avenue in the Bronx with two friends from Los Angeles. After getting our sandwiches, we went to the register to pay.

The man at the counter rang up my friend’s order and put his sandwich in a brown paper bag.

My friend said he didn’t need the bag.

The man looked at him, maintained strong eye contact, took the sandwich out of the bag, crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

“My deli,” he said. “My rules.”

My other friend said that she, too, didn’t need a bag.

Again, strong eye contact followed by another bag being crumpled and thrown in the trash.

The man looked at me.

“You too?” he asked.

“Bag is fine,” I said. He and I both started to laugh. My friends joined in cautiously.

“Welcome to New York,” I said when we got outside.

— Jessica Ward

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.


Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — A.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Jeff Boda and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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