Pol: UN building, Grand Central should fall under city inspection
| dfreedlander@am-ny.comNearly 900
buildings throughout the five boroughs -- including
some of the most iconic in New York City -- need to
be brought in line with the local building codes and
be subjected to city-mandated safety inspections,
Manhattan Borough
President
Scott Stringer said
Sunday.
The 885 structures exempt from city building codes
and regular inspections by the city and the
FDNY include the
UN's Secretariat Building, Grand Central Station,
Penn Station and the
Port Authority Bus
Terminal, according Stringer's office. The buildings
do not have to comply with city codes and
inspections because they are either owned by the
federal or state government, by independent
authorities like the Port Authority, or by foreign
governments or organizations.
"If something goes wrong in a foreign embassy or in
a state building, it's our firefighters -- New York
City firefighters -- that are going to have to go up
those stairs and save those lives, and they don't
have a road map in those 885 buildings," said
Stringer at a news conference at the
Deutsche Bank
building at Ground Zero, where two firefighters died
last year in a blaze.
City and other inspections at the building, owned by
the quasi-governmental Lower Manhattan Development
Corp., had not detected safety lapses, and the fire
led to finger-pointing over inspections and access.
State Sen. Marty Connor (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn)
called on Gov.
David Paterson to
issue an executive order mandating that all
state-owned buildings and those owned by state
agencies bring themselves into compliance and
subject themselves to inspection by the Department
of Buildings immediately.





