Syracuse, N.Y. – City masons doing a minor repair in a prominent 550-car downtown parking garage Nov. 3 picked up something odd: a sheared bolt.
Syracuse officials investigated and made a startling discovery: A steel beam helping to hold up the seven-story structure had sunk 9 inches into the ground in recent months, 40 years after its construction.
The movement of the beam dragged down heavy concrete panels attached to it. That created gaps between the panels — visual evidence of the dangerous structural defect.
The failure leaves in doubt the future of the city-owned Fayette Street garage a block from City Hall.
The safety risk was so great that Deputy Commissioner of Code Enforcement Jake Dishaw ordered the closure of the garage on Nov. 6. Engineers hired by the city had warned of a potential collapse.
Dishaw told syracuse.com | The Post-Standard the city sent engineers to inspect the garage after city masons repairing stairs in the structure noticed a sheared bolt on one of the garage’s floors.
The city asked engineers from C&S Cos. to inspect the garage. They found the bolt had been helping to connect a concrete panel to a vertical beam at the northwest corner of the structure, he said.
The bolt sheared off when the vertical beam sank 9 inches deeper into the ground, he said.
It’s unknown exactly when the beam sank. But Dishaw said city officials believe it occurred sometime between April and October of this year, based on images on Google Maps.
Google Street View, a technology feature in Google Maps that provides interactive panoramas from positions along many streets around the world, contains an image from April that shows no evidence that the beam had sunk, he said.
An image taken in October, on the other hand, shows that horizontal concrete slabs attached to the beam were no longer level, he said.
He said the bolt appeared to have snapped off fairly recently because the inner part of the bolt was not rusted like the outside of it was.
“We think this is pretty recent, just in the last couple of months,” he said.
In addition to closing the garage, the city has fenced off the sidewalk along the northwest corner of the garage because of the danger the heavy concrete panels will fall off the garage.
Dishaw said the city plans to remove 18 of the concrete slabs, weighing about 7,000 pounds each, to take weight off the sunken beam. Engineers will then shore up the beam to prevent any immediate collapse, he said.
Sol Muñoz, a spokesperson for the city, said the work is expected to begin in early December.
City officials refused to provide a copy of the C&S Cos. report on the garage without a written request under the state Freedom of Information Law. Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard filed that request on Nov. 17.
Officials do not know what caused the beam to sink, but they suspect corrosion, Dishaw said. A more in-depth inspection that includes boring underground will be done after the beam is shored up, he said.
He said a visual inspection of the rest of the garage did not show any obvious signs that other support beams have sunk. However, engineers will conduct a more thorough inspection of them once the shoring is completed, he said.
“If it happens in one spot, it’s possible other locations could be corroded,” he said. “I would say it’s certainly possible.”
Dishaw said corrosion is a common problem in parking garages in cold-weather cities. Snow, ice and salt that vehicles bring in on their tires eat away at the concrete and steel, he said.
As a result, the lifespan of parking garages in Syracuse is only about 50 years, he said. At 40 years old, the Fayette Street garage is nearing the end of its lifespan, he said.
City workers conduct annual “walk through” inspections of city- and privately owned parking garages and perform more in-depth “structural” inspections every three years, Dishaw said. The inspections are required by state and local codes.
The last scheduled structural inspection of the Fayette Street garage was conducted in September 2024 and did not show any problem with the beam, he said.
Once engineers determine why the beam sank, the city will have to decide whether to repair it or demolish the garage.
Depending on how much it would cost to repair and how many more years of use the city would get from the garage, it may make more sense to tear it down and build a new garage, Dishaw said.
Approximately 450 vehicles parked at the garage daily, including about 120 belonging to city employees who work at City Hall and the nearby One Park Place office building.
Dishaw said the city employees have been given spots in the city’s Washington Street garage four blocks away. That same garage also has more than enough room to accommodate the other motorists who parked at the Fayette garage, he said.
“It certainly is going to be an inconvenience to people,” he said.
Similar closings have happened before. The city ordered the closure of the upper floors of a privately owned 400-car garage at 325-345 S. Warren St. in March 2023, saying they were unsafe.
It ordered a privately owned 560-car garage at the southwest corner of Harrison and South Warren streets to close in March 2024 because of 11 code violations.
