CHELSEA — The developer of a 12-story luxury West 25th Street apartment building project plagued by safety violations continues to skirt city building requirements, Department of Buildings officials and records confirm.
Contractors working for Natfali Group's 261 West 25th St. 49-unit condo construction, dubbed The Seymore, left a 10-foot gap in a protective sidewalk shed that was supposed to run the length of the construction site, building inspectors found on June 27.
The builders, Ross and Associates LLC, were ordered not to work over the gap in the shed, building officials said, but may continue to work on the rest of the building.
The city requires that the Partial Stop Work Order be displayed at the site, but no evidence of the citation could be found when searched by a DNAinfo reporter. A construction worker at the site said he had no knowledge of the partial stop work order.
Besides the unsafe scaffolding, the building has four other open DOB violations, according to records.
A pedestrian was injured on May 2 when a piece of drywall fell on the passerby, according to DOB records.
More than a week later, on May 12, inspectors found debris strewn across the street and sidewalk where cars and pedestrians were passing.
Workers fled the site in May when inspectors showed up asking to see their identification and couldn’t provide proof that they’d taken OSHA safety training, records from a May inspection show.
Neither the Neftali Group nor Ross and Associates responded to requests for comment.
The dangers building construction pose to pedestrians are anything but abstract. In March, a 37-year-old woman in the West Village was struck and killed when a piece of plywood became dislodged from a construction site. Tram-Thuy Nguyen was talking on her cellphone when the construction material knocked her into a brick wall.
