New York|First Came the Sound of Falling Bricks, Then an ‘Earthquake’

Outside the three-story building on Flatbush Avenue, loud popping sounds cut through the street noise.

“I thought it was gunshots at first,” said Benewaa Bonsu, a neighbor who had been walking by the construction site next to the building.

James Williams, who works at a deli across the street, had grown used to loud noises coming from the site, where crews had been digging below the earth to prepare a foundation for a new building.

He looked out and saw bricks falling off the building and into the pit.

“It went click, click, click, click, click — bricks was falling,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, hell, what is going on?’”

Then, he said, “the building start to crumble.”

Inside one third-floor apartment in the building, a harrowing scene was captured on video. A young boy fetches milk from a refrigerator while another, a toddler, plays on the floor. All of a sudden, one of the room’s walls falls away into thin air, with parts of it collapsing back into the room. The boy with the milk runs, and the one on the floor scrambles backward as a woman screams in the next room. In seconds, the whole building would be gone.

In the deli nearby, Mr. Williams watched as the front of 1321 Flatbush Avenue just slid away. The side went, too. A check-cashing office he often visited on the first floor seemed to vanish. He saw clothes and a microwave oven fly out of the open building and into the dusty chaos. People screamed. And then, he said, the rest of the structure collapsed. It took with it an entire wall of a building next door, exposing apartment bedrooms and closets and halls in still-life.