The Big Mess at the Old St. George

By mid-morning on Monday, the steel and concrete marquee of the old St. George Hotel was still slumped on the sidewalk, its signage twisted and letters shaken loose. The stretch of Henry Street where the awning had collapsed early on Sunday morning was walled off with forest-green plywood, as was the building’s second awning just around the corner on Clark Street. The MTA had trains bypassing the Clark Street stop on the 2/3. Anna Ziegler hadn’t realized any of this, which is why she was standing on the block with her 8-year-old, waiting for an Uber to take them both to his camp drop-off. “It feels like we’re only fixing things after the fact instead of discovering things that need fixing ahead of time,” she tells me. “Which is scary.” And a fairly accurate description of what seems to have happened: At a press conference later that morning, New York City Transit president Demetrius Crichlow said that the agency’s real-estate team had toured the property the Friday before the collapse and issued a letter to the building’s owners about the conditions of the subway station. “That’s the extent that our responsibility goes,” he added.

Lincoln Restler, the councilmember for Brooklyn Heights, had been the one to request that tour. The once grand Art Deco hotel is owned by an LLC called St. George Hotel Associate, which is also responsible for maintaining the Clark Street stop under an agreement with the MTA. (It’s one of the agency’s many nesting-doll arrangements with private entities to manage what’s effectively public space.) The partnership hasn’t been going great, according to Restler: “The St. George has been a bad landlord.” In addition to dilapidated awnings hanging over the entrances, he said the Clark Street stop is just generally in bad shape: “There’s a consistent stench of sewage. It’s grimy, it’s filthy.” Restler and Crichlow didn’t discuss the awnings on the tour, but per PIX 11, a 2024 inspection done by a private firm found problems related to the façade. The department inspectors on the scene on Monday discovered that the steel beams that held up the awning were completely corroded through in several spots, while the Clark Street awning also showed similar signs of poor maintenance, a spokesperson said. “That entrance looked like it was going to fall on the street the entire time I’ve lived in this neighborhood,” one resident tells me.

But who’s behind the St. George Hotel Associate LLC? So far, it’s not clear. Initial reporting, citing information provided by Restler and MTA officials, said the company that operates the dorms in the old St. George — Educational Housing Services — owned the building. Except Educational Housing Services says it doesn’t. So as it stands right now, an anonymous LLC is on the hook for the catastrophe and the apparent failures to address the structural issues with the building and the adjoining subway entrances. Per The City, there are approximately 150 entrances throughout the 472-station subway system that are privately maintained, and it can sometimes be hard to get those private owners to do … anything. “Bottom line, we don’t have any control over them,” MTA chairman Janno Lieber told The City in 2022 about the private developers responsible for subway-station elevators, adding that the transit authority is “using all the powers that we do have at our disposal to put pressure on them.” Restler is hoping that the disaster on Henry Street might push the MTA to “look into how we can claim back what is clearly a public space.”

After the awning collapse, St. George Hotel Associate received two violations for failing to properly maintain the building, totaling $15,000 in penalties in what could have easily been a deadly collapse at any other time of day. The city also ordered the landlord — whose name we still don’t know — to hire an engineer for an independent assessment and develop a plan to properly shore up the Clark Street awning. By Tuesday morning, trains were stopping at the station once again. Passersby, meanwhile, will continue to marvel at how much worse the collapse could have been — and how, by some miracle, it wasn’t. “That thing is pretty heavy,” Michael Gold, a retiree who lives on Hicks Street, tells me. “Someone walking underneath it would’ve been an instant disaster.”