On the Scene at the Building Collapse on Flatbush Avenue

Late this afternoon, Novella Spence was awakened in her Flatbush Avenue apartment by her child’s cries. “Mommy the building is falling,” the 51-year-old recalls her daughter saying. “I run to the window and look,” she said, describing the scene across the street. “It looks like 9/11. There was mist from the crumble, and the side of the building was gone.” The three-story building at 1321 Flatbush Avenue—with a medical-uniforms store on the ground floor and a three-bedroom apartment above—had indeed fallen, killing two people and trapping several more in the debris. Around 4 p.m., the structure slid into the open construction site next door at 2625 Bedford Avenue, FDNY officials said. Its neighbor on the opposite side, at 1323 Flatbush, remained standing, but the party wall between the two had been cleanly peeled off, revealing an uncanny dollhouse view of the relatively intact apartments inside. The back of someone’s closet was ripped away, but the jackets within remained, untouched and neatly lined up, on their hangers. Marre Valcourt, a 49-year-old hairstylist working across the street at Maribel’s, a local salon, had been in the back of the shop and stepped outside a moment later. “I was shaking. I see people crying, because the building is full of people.” In addition to the two deaths, four people were critically injured and at least 12 more suffered minor injuries, according to the NYPD. A firefighter, one of 250 fire and EMS personnel who descended on the scene, was also hurt during the effort to get several people out of the rubble and stabilize the site. By 7 p.m., emergency vehicles lined the blocks from Foster to well beyond Newkirk Avenue. Hundreds of people gathered behind police tape, watching, many with cameras out. Shelley Nunez, 44, who lives nearby, had heard a “boom” from her apartment that afternoon followed by sirens. “This neighborhood has a lot of ambulances, so I didn’t think much of it,” she said, explaining that she’d thought it was something relatively commonplace like a car crash. “Until friends started calling and saying, ‘Hey, a building collapsed.’” There will of course be investigations into the particulars, but the likely cause is pretty obvious: The collapsed building had been undermined by the construction project next door at 2625 Bedford. That site—until recently occupied by a low-slung building that had housed an adult-day-care service—has been owned since 2024 by an entity called FF1632, which is approved to put up a three-story structure there and has been applying to expand that plan to nine mixed-use stories. The contractor had already been cited in April for carrying out demolition while under a a stop-work order; work resumed after the company paid a $10,000 fine. “Buildings are being purchased and demolished to put up new buildings, but sometimes they’re not paying attention to the types of buildings around them,” said one 30-year-old, Crystal, who lives nearby. “A lot of these buildings are from way back to the Flatbush days, so you gotta be really careful.” Added Spence, “This was a cataclysmic catastrophe. This shouldn’t have happened.” She speculated that something on the construction site had struck the building: “I don’t think it fell on its own. They had to hit something to make it fall.” She adds that there was work underway shortly before the building came down. “They’ve been doing work for months. All you hear is drrrr.” Even as the mess unfolded, life went on. Inside Maribel’s hair salon, business continued as usual as a flood of emergency-vehicle lights flashed outside. Milca Mondesir, 37, who lives nearby on Avenue D, was in a chair near the back as Valcourt styled her hair. She described the buildings in the area as “crusty” and “dirty” and “full of big rats. You’d never expect that to happen—but not shocked that it did,” she said. On the Scene at the Building Collapse on Flatbush Avenue Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences.