Waldorf Astoria Hit With Stop Work Order After Hardhat Plunges to His Death
Elie William has been identified as the 45 year old construction worker who plummeted to his death through a hole in a suspended catwalk on Jan. 2. The landmarked Art Deco hotel shut down in 2017 for an extensive overhaul. It has experienced delays and cost overruns even before the latest tragedy.
The Waldorf Astoria’s much-delayed $2 billion overhaul was hit with a full stop-work order after a 45 year-old construction worker plummeted to his death on Thursday, Jan. 2.
Policed identified the victim as Elie William by Jan. 6. He fell through a hole in a suspended ceiling on the swanky Park Ave. hotel’s sixth floor shortly before 10 a.m., before landing 40 ft. below in a third floor ballroom. He was reportedly helping an electrician at the time, and was pronounced dead at the scene by EMS.
The luxury hotel is in the midst of a $2 billion top-to-bottom revamp. It shut down in 2017 after planning to add 375 condos for long-term residents, and was originally scheduled to reopen its doors to patrons in 2020, but COVID and other construction delays pushed the opening back to this spring.
Suffolk Construction Corporation is the project’s general contractor, while the while Pierre-Yves Rochon is in charge of the revamped interiors. The 625-foot-tall Art Deco landmark occupies a full city block bound by Park Avenue to the west, East 49th Street to the south, East 50th Street to the north, and Lexington Avenue to the east.
Under the stop work order, the DOB is demanding that safety conditions for construction workers be improved before the order will be lifted.
”Failure to safeguard and maintain safety measure led to the cause of the incident, DOB violation was issued Stop all construction work entire jobsite, provide safety measures for operations going forward,” the order notes.
It’s the second fatal construction accident on the East Side of Manhattan in less than a month. Queens resident Jose Ramirez Munoz, another 45 year-old construction worker, was killed on Dec. 13 while working on the demolition of the Community Church of New York–and its affiliated residential brownstones–on E. 35th St., between Madison and Lexington Avenues.
In that incident, a cherry picker that he was riding on hoisted him 32 ft. above the ground, bashing him into a steel beam. He was pronounced dead by EMS at the scene. Another 35 year-old worker was treated at Bellevue Hospital for minor injuries.
The church site had been purchased by Continuum Co., a real estate development company headed by Bruce Eichner, in a deal made by the congregation that was finalized in Oct. 2024. Continuum reportedly intends to build a luxury condominium building on the site of the former church and church-owned brownstones. A full stop-work order also remains in place there nearly a month later, while the DOB completes a Construction Safety Enforcement (CSE) audit.
According to a 2024 “Deadly Skyline” report by a group called the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)–which is based on 2022 data collected by the United States Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics–construction-related deaths were on the rise in New York City that year, for a total of 11.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers.
It’s unclear if trends have changed, but for NYCOSH the figures illustrate that construction is historically one of the most “dangerous industries in the country.”
The report noted that district attorneys could use Carlos’s Law, passed statewide in 2022, to hold “corporate entities” with unsafe construction sites accountable by levying fines of up to $50,000. It’s named after Carlos Moncayo, a 22 year-old Queens resident and Ecuadorean immigrant that was killed in 2015 while working on a Restoration Hardware store in the Meatpacking District.
NYCOSH adds that families of the bereaved also use “New York’s Scaffold Safety Law” to sue employers if their loved ones are killed or injured on a job site by falling from an elevated place.