Video courtesy of The Observer's Azi Paybarah.

Mr. Bloomberg was on his live weekly show on WOR when news of the collapse broke. His initial reaction reveals a man who will not take any guff about what one can only assume will be tighter oversight of construction sites in the near future:

Mr. Ryan, temporarily wallet-less, lives at 1748 First Avenue, between 90th and 91st streets. But this afternoon he was inside Richard R. Greene High School, on 88th Street, where officials had set up a First Aid center.

The Observer fanned out this morning and afternoon to interview people directly impacted by the collapse. The overwhelming emotion? Anger.

Marianna Tauss, who lives on East 90th Street, woke up to ambulance and fire engine sirens and the whirr-whirr of helicopters. “We are furious,” Ms.Tauss said.

As she spoke, four helicopters circled overhead. Debris hung over 91st Street, at First Avenue, the construction site for the Azure condop development. It was from there, this morning, that the crane toppled, scraping down the the Electra, the white balconied building across the street. Fire trucks blocked off the area between Second and York avenues, 89th to 93rd streets.

Mayor Bloomberg and city officials became a target for residents' ire.

“The mayor doesn't do anything,” said Eulania Stack, 71, a resident of the Knickerbocker Plaza on Second Avenue, as she stood at a police blockade. “They don't care about the working-class people. Nobody cares about the tenants."

"Bloomberg is in cahoots with developers," complained an elderly gentleman in a faded orange Clemson University cap, as he watched Fox News conduct an interview.

Local City Council member Jessica Lappin, who spent much of the day at the scene, said assigning blame would have to wait until more details emerge. Until then, she said her primary concern was to help her constituents, like the woman she found crying because she had had to leave her pet behind.

Jacob Kriegler, 23, who lives on the eighth floor of the Electra, the damaged building, exercised no such restraint.

"[Mayor Bloomberg] needs to get his cranes under control," Mr. Kriegler said.

This morning, a crane at the site of the Azure condop development at First Avenue and 91st Street tumbled onto the building across the street, damaging it from the 20th floor to the Duane Reade on the ground floor, and killing at least one person (if not two, depending on reports).

Here are some of Mayor Bloomberg's remarks, via The New York Times:

For his part, Governor Patterson said:

We will continue to blog about this throughout the day. Here's our prior coverage.

Meanwhile, Curbed has compiled a list of recent crane disasters, including, of course, the March 15 collapse on East 51st Street that killed seven people and led to Buildings Commissioner Patricia Lancaster's resignation.

A New York Post column published the morning after began, “Katherine Hepburn must be turning in her grave,” in reference to the late actress and one of the more famous Turtle Bay locals. “Shoddy construction by greedy moneymen is destroying the whole Turtle Bay area around Second Avenue, filling the neighborhood she loved with countless world-class ugly buildings,” Linda Stasi wrote. “What they’ve done to Second Avenue in the last few years is criminal. Yesterday it turned deadly.”

Like most neighborhoods in Manhattan, many new condos have gone up recently in Turtle Bay—the area roughly between 42nd and 53rd streets east of Lexington Avenue—and more projects are in the pipeline. But aside from the recently arrested buildings inspector, no criminal activity has been linked to the other developments. Bruce Silberblatt, vice president of the neighborhood residents’ group the Turtle Bay Association, rattled off at least 11 residential projects that are in various stages of development or have recently come on-line.

Since Turtle Bay was last rezoned in 1961 to encourage high-density residential and retail development on the avenues and four- to six-story buildings on the side streets, new projects have consistently risen above the original multi-family brownstones of Turtle Bay, except during economic downturns.

But the latest construction wave that kicked off in 2005 with Harry Macklowe’s 30-story, blue glass condominium on the corner of 53rd and Second Avenue has been the most concentrated in the neighborhood’s history, Mr. Silberblatt said. A year later Related Companies broke ground on the Veneto across the street. Now the two gleaming towers stand like sentries at the northern boundary of Turtle Bay.

Extell converted a 35-story rental tower at 212 East 47th to condos; the Alexander will soon rise at the corner of Second Avenue and East 49th Street, which has ironically been designated Katherine Hepburn Way. Mr. Silberblatt agreed with Ms. Stasi that “Katherine would not be happy with what’s going on here.”

Then of course there is the construction site at 303 East 51st Street where the 20-story crane collapsed. A few doors down at number 211, another apartment building is being built; and next to Green Acre Park a 14-story building has been stripped to its frame in what Mr. Silberblatt called a “gut job," and seven more floors will be added. The list goes on.

One of the comment threads on Curbed following a story about the crane collapse instantly turned into a discussion about the neighborhood’s new buildings. “They are cheap cardboard towers, designed by the Russian mafia, and then thrown in the market with the word ‘luxury,'” one reader wrote.
“The Alexander must be stopped NOW,” wrote another.

“Not all the new buildings are terrible (310 East 53rd is great, IMO; The Vento, not so much, but not horrific), but this is truly awful.”

Some new projects might even be welcome. There are rumors that 315 East 46th will be affordable housing, which the Turtle Bay Association appreciates, though some residents who “feel like it should be a place for snobs where you pay $1.5 million for a closet” disapprove, said Mr. Silberblatt. They will soon be able to look down their noses from the 40-story condo the Zeckendorf brothers plan to build at 823 UN Plaza, which is expected to be “as expensive as the affordable housing is cheap,” he said.

The residential development is unavoidable and not entirely unexpected.
“It’s something that I’ve always thought of as inevitable,” Mr. Silberblatt said. “I always wondered why people hadn’t discovered it yet, then two or three years ago it started.”

The Turtle Bay Association is circulating a petition to keep 303 East 51st Street at its current height of 18 stories, rather than the 30 that are planned. But Mr. Silberblatt does not sound like he expects their campaign to succeed.
“There’s nothing we can do to slow the pace [of construction],” he said. “The only thing that will stall it is if we go into a recession, which looks like it's happening.”

The crane collapse might also prompt a hiccup in the residential market, albeit a brief one. Susan Krupp, a senior broker at Bellmarc Realty, expects the market in Turtle Bay to slow down until the crane incident is cleaned up.
“It’s just like when a plane crashed into the building on 72nd Street,” she said. “People will forget after a few weeks, and once it’s out of peoples’ minds things will go back to normal. But normal now is not what it was a few months ago.”

Ms. Krupp said Turtle Bay had been on the upswing with increased demand from international buyers looking for a pied a terre and young professionals. Though the bulk of the condos in the four or five new buildings between 51st and 55th streets run upwards of $1 million, she said, on the whole property values on the Upper East Side and East Midtown are still less than other neighborhoods in the city.

Turtle Bay’s demographics have shifted with increased residential development, but it remains a relatively quiet, residential neighborhood.
New bars and restaurants have flooded Second Avenue, mingling with the old-school, white-table-clothed (but reasonably priced) establishments that preceded them.

This Wednesday during a not-quite-spring, warm evening after work the bars were packed with suited middle-aged businesspeople and their thirty-something counterparts who still give off the faintest whiff of college. A smattering of senior citizens perched at quiet spots in the bar and watched sports, ate dinner or drank next to the boisterous post work crowds.

Some bloggers and long-time residents blame the new developments for turning a mixed-income neighborhood into a wealthy, antiseptic place.
In 1860, Turtle Bay was “definitely the wrong side of the tracks," said Mr. Silberblatt, filled with beer factories and tenements—the space now occupied by the UN building used to be home to a giant slaughterhouse. In the 1920’s, the co-ops of Beekman and Sutton Place were built, and more expensive apartments followed in the 1950’s when the El Train was torn down. Turtle Bay also had a substantial portion of rent-controlled units that developers have eagerly converted to market-rate when the original tenants passed away, as was the case for Mr. Silberblatt’s parents.

But the Turtle Bay of today is hardly homogenous. Elderly, lower middle-class people walk around next to yuppie professionals. East of Second Avenue as you get closer to the UN, Turtle Bay morphs into the serene, residential neighborhood long-time residents remember through rose-colored glasses. Nigerian diplomats stroll out of the Japanese Consulate building behind the colossal Trump UN Plaza. Nearby a father and son kick around a soccer ball in the Dag Hamarskjold Plaza.

As a home base for foreign diplomats, Turtle Bay has the transient, yet comfortably dependable quality of an upscale hotel for business travelers. At the same time, the residents who have had roots there for generations lend it a sense of permanence. Lately Turtle Bay appears to have acquired a Murray Hill-esque sensibility thanks to an influx of young people.

Jill Sloane, the senior vice president of Halstead Property, lived on 51st between First and Second when she was 20. “Back then the neighborhood was a nice place to live,” she said. “It was mixed, but you had nothing like those those huge, glass buildings you have now. It’s become much more trendy and younger.”

The demographic shift has not been without its tensions. Lyle Frank, the chairman of Community Board 6 that represents Turtle Bay, said the dynamic between new businesses and long-time residents of the community has been “interesting,” by which he means carefully trod. “There is that [three-block)] stretch of Second Avenue beginning at 53rd that has nearly 20 bars on it. On the one hand it’s been good for the businesses in the neighborhood because people like to leave one bar and go to another, but on other you have people living there who need to sleep.

“You’ve got these places getting liquor licenses, saying they are going to be white-table-cloth dining rooms and then you find out they play loud music and are open until four in the morning.”

He says the State Liquor Authority used to only take action after being alerted, and in some cases sued, by the community boards. Lately, it has been more vigilant about enforcing the “500 foot rule," which holds that if there are more then three bars within 500 feet of each other, they are subject to more state scrutiny.

Now that Sheldon Solow’s massive East River project flanking Turtle Bay has been approved by the City Council, the neighborhood will probably remain in flux for the foreseeable future. Soon, it will most likely be out of the spotlight too.

Based on the amount of incidents in the first quarter of this year and the number of crane applications submitted to the Department of Buildings, the trend may continue through 2008.

Before the disastrous crane collapse in Turtle Bay on March 15, there had already been three crane-related incidents—one of which injured a worker—at building sites in the five boroughs. The number of developments that applied for crane permits increased from 707 in 2003 to 931 in 2006, the last year where complete statistics are available.

“More than ever, cranes are being set up by unlicensed riggers, operated unsafely and used to hoist loads far heavier than what they were built to manage,” the Daily News reported.

In many of the cases where the DOB has cited crane operators for construction violations, work has continued apace during the (often long) interims between the accidents and scheduled hearings of the Environmental Control Board, the body responsible for determining penalties. The fines that are meted out are “typically low and punishment haphazard,” the report says.

In February, a crane collapsed at a Tribeca building site, for instance, and the operator was issued a violation for “grossly overloading” the crane. Construction resumed almost immediately, though the hearing will not take place until April 17.

All of the casualties from the 19-story crane's collapse on Saturday were construction workers at the site, except for one woman visiting a friend in a nearby townhouse to celebrate St. Patrick's Day. The NYPD released on Sunday the names of four men who were killed in the accident: Wayne Bleidner, 51, of Pelham; Brad Cohen, 54, of Farmingdale; Anthony Mazza, 39; and Aaron Stephens, 45, of New York City. The identities of the three others discovered are not available yet.