EAST VILLAGE — A man was in critical condition and nearly 40 partygoers had to be rescued from a rooftop early Sunday after the stairwell in an apartment building gave way, fire officials said.
The collapse took place at 1:25 a.m. as roughly three dozen people partied on top of a roof of the seven-story corner building at 159 Second Avenue, according to the FDNY.
The man, whose identity had not been released, was going down the stairs after leaving the college rager, according to the Daily News, when the stair platforms between floors gave way and he plummeted two stories down, an FDNY spokesman said.
"Some guy runs upstairs and says, "Everyone quiet down...someone might have died," an NYU film student Martin Barshai, 20, told the News.
Partygoers ran towards the exit just to find "a gaping hole at the bottom of the first set of stairs from the roof," the paper wrote.
The man suffered many serious injuries as he crashed through the four half-landings and was treated on the scene by rescuers who arrived at 1:30 a.m. He was rushed to Bellevue Hospital, but his current condition was not known.
The remaining partygoers were rescued by a tower bucket, which lowered them to street level in small groups as members of the FDNY shored up the building with wooden boards and planks, the spokesman said.
Other residents of the buiding were not evacuated after the shoring up, the FDNY said, at the request of the Department of Buildings.
A Buildings Department spokeswoman said that a violation was issued to the property owner, listed as Sasha Realty LLC, in Hartsdale, N.Y., for failing to maintain the building, and said an investigation was ongoing.
