TEMPLE OF DOOM
Hardhat killed by wall collapse at synagogue
A wall collapse at a Lower East Side construction site for a burned-out historic synagogue Monday killed one worker and injured another.
First responders rushed to 60 Norfolk St. after getting a call at 9:58 a.m. and found two workers buried under a pile of brick and masonry rubble after a wall they were working on crashed down around them.
Stanislaw Supinsky was taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital Lower Manhattan and died a short time later, officials said. The other worker was rushed to Bellevue Hospital and suffered only minor injuries.
At Supinsky’s Ridgewood, Queens, home, his girlfriend sobbed over his tragic death. Neighbor Crystal Inzirillo, 37, said the victim attended church regularly and that he and his girlfriend were the “best tenants” in the building owned by her grandmother.
“I’m just still in so much shock,” Inzirillo said. “He was a nice man, a quiet man. I saw him last night.”
Two years ago, an inferno ripped through the synagogue that housed Beth Hamedrash Hagodol, the oldest Jewish Orthodox congregation in the city. The temple, built in 1850, is a city landmark. Its severely damaged outer walls were all that was left after the fire.
Those walls were salvaged and incorporated into designs for a new development. On Monday, workers were slated to take down structurally unsound parts of the walls to shore up the entire structure, officials said.
“It should have been knocked down earlier,” said Ed Cortes, whose sixth-floor apartment overlooks the construction site. “It’s dangerous.”
After the fire, plans emerged to build a dual-tower complex that would include 500 apartments and a new synagogue, though that plan has not yet been approved by the city.
The city Department of Buildings’ website lists 21 open violations on the building — with one dating as far back as 1997. Violations issued after the fire include one for “lack of maintenance preceding fire” and another for failing to protect the structure after the blaze.
The Buildings Department dispatched inspectors Monday after the death.
“DOB experts in structural engineering and emergency response are on scene conducting an aggressive investigation of this tragedy,” said Buildings Department spokeswoman Abigail Kunitz. “Every worker who leaves for the job site in the morning deserves to come home safely at night.”
A preliminary Buildings Department investigation determined there is no imminent danger of further collapse at the site, but that structural stability inspections are still ongoing.