Window Washer Gets $8M Settlement

Orbe's safety belt (seen on the sidewalk in front of the Council on Foreign Relations building) most likely saved him from being impaled as he fell, according to court papers. Click to enlarge.

Window washer gets $8M settlement for Upper East Side plunge: Faby Del Orbe suffered several fractures and fell into a coma for three weeks when he fell from the Council on Foreign Relations building on Park Ave. in September 2012, according to court papers.

The Council on Foreign Relations has paid an $8 million settlement to a Brooklyn window washer who plunged four stories from the venerable institution’s landmark building on the Upper East Side, the Daily News has learned. Faby Del Orbe had hooked his safety harness to the exterior anchors of a fourth-floor window of the Harold Pratt House on East 68th St. at Park Ave. on Sept. 1, 2012.

When Del Orbe leaned back to do his job, the anchors came loose, causing the worker, then 28, to fall more than 30 feet. He struck an iron fence on the way down — but his nylon webbed belt absorbed the brunt of that impact, preventing him from being impaled. Still, Del Orbe suffered fractures of the vertebrae, pelvis, rib and heel and was in a coma for three weeks, according to papers filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court.

A lawyer for the Council on Foreign Relations blamed Del Orbe for failing to check the window anchors, and also a contractor for removing the interior bolts several months earlier while installing a plexiglass cover over the window to keep out drafts. The contractor “didn’t advise the council that they have done so and in fact no one was aware that the bolt was cut until Mr. Del Orbe attached himself to it,” lawyer Lisa Fitzgerald argued in court papers.

Del Orbe was required to inspect the integrity of the window anchors he was hooking onto before washing, she said. That didn’t fly with a judge who found the council was liable, leading to the settlement reached last month.

Del Orbe’s lawyer Scott Rynecki said the window washer, a married father, can no longer work due to permanent injuries. “This settlement hopefully will send a message to building owners that they have an obligation to inspect all safety devices in their buildings so workers are properly protected,” Ryneck said. The Council on Foreign Relations, which declined to comment, is an independent think tank and publisher. Its board members include several former cabinet members, including Colin Powell and Robert Rubin.

Faby Del Orbe said the window anchors failed at the E. 68th St. building in September 2012.

Brent Weingard Does Windows

Mr. Weingard, armed with his trusty bucket and other gear, restored the view of the skyline at the apartment of the artist Eleanora Kupencow in Brooklyn. Click to enlarge.

The Grime Fighter: Brent Weingard Does Windows - The unforgiving pavement of Greenwich Street unspooled half a dozen stories below. But Brent Weingard, who had strapped himself into an olive-green harness and attached himself to a canvas belt that in turn was attached to a hook on the facade of No. 55, seemed oblivious to the fact that gravity was not his friend. Dangling outside the oversize double-hung window, the belt his only protection, Mr. Weingard didn’t bat an eye.

Silhouetted against a large swath of the West Village, he squirted blobs of Joy (“my grandmother swore by it”) into his bucket of water, razored off hard-to-remove grime, and sponged away cascades of dirty water with the fuzzy multicolored mops that he calls porcupines, using microfiber cloth for the corners. Moving as gracefully as a dancer, he finished up with crisp, meticulous swipes of his squeegee. By the time Mr. Weingard crawled back into the apartment 10 minutes later, his bucket was brimming with black water, testament to how filthy a New York window can get in just a few months or even weeks, especially a window hard by highways. But he finds scrubbing away grime deeply satisfying.

“I like working with squeegees and water,” Mr. Weingard, 55, said as he stepped carefully about in his black Red Wing work boots with their no-scuff soles. “Washing windows is dirty work because the city is so dirty. And to be honest, I don’t think the work is all that healthy. But I love it.”

Mr. Weingard is the moving force behind Expert Window Cleaners, a company that he started nearly three decades ago as a political science student at Columbia University and now operates out of his Yorkville apartment. He had been introduced to the craft when his globe-trotting father, who worked for I.B.M., moved the family for a time to house-proud Holland, and young Brent watched window washers at work. Some years later he bought his first professional equipment; today he works in some 1,000 buildings a year. His strong right arm is his team of 10 assistants, mostly from Ecuador and Guatemala.

The city’s high-end residential buildings are his specialty, and he’ll go anywhere — to Greenwich Village town houses, to glass towers like the Post Toscana on First Avenue, to Upper West Side grandes dames like the Ansonia. His clients, especially the downtown variety, are a roster of the rich and/or famous, among them Lenny Kravitz (Mr. Weingard remembers the pile of guitars in a corner), E. L. Doctorow and Monica Lewinsky. He can tell tales of the van Goghs and Picassos he has seen and of apartments so vast he has gotten lost.

The tools of his trade are simple, even homely — the porcupine mops, the squeegee, the dropcloths, the faded towels (laundered daily), the bottles of purified water, the stubby green stepladder. But with half a dozen jobs on a day that typically starts at 8 and goes until 6, his schedule is complex. Making his way around congested city streets, the eternal search for a parking space (amazingly, he always seems to find one), struggling to show up at the appointed hour (or apologizing profusely when he’s running late), not trekking dirt onto a client’s floors or splattering the new curtains — sometimes washing windows seems the least of it.

This morning Mr. Weingard was working solo at the century-old Archive, where he has been a regular since the building opened as a luxury rental complex in 1988 with nearly 500 apartments. “This was my first building,” he said, parking his powder-blue minivan across the street. “The super, George Wagner, was a friend.” To this day, Mr. Weingard still pries open recalcitrant windows using an ingenious iron contraption that Mr. Wagner invented and christened the window popper.

Lugging his stuff to an apartment being readied for a new tenant, he suited up in his belt and harness, cautiously made his way onto the narrow ledge just outside the glass, attached his belt to hooks on the building’s facade and set to work. If he has an audience inside the apartment, however, he will tell stories gleaned from decades of viewing the city from a distinctive perspective.

“I remember the time I got stuck outside this building,” he said as he wielded his squeegee. “It was winter, the window was closed, it got stuck and I couldn’t get it open. Then it started snowing.” Gingerly, he made his way across the ledge to the window of the apartment next door, pried it open, stepped in, buzzed the intercom, “and Walter in the lobby rescued me.”

“And of course everyone mentions Kundera,” Mr. Weingard said, alluding to the author of the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” with its surgeon-turned-window-washer protagonist. Though he once met a girlfriend through a customer, he has never wound up a job by popping open a bottle of Champagne and enjoying an amorous moment with a client. His work has, however, led him to cross paths with a number of people who have become part of his life, among them his doctor, his lawyer and his dentist.

Happily for him, he has no stories about sudden attacks of vertigo. If he suffered from acrophobia, he said, he’d be in another line of work, “because that’s something you don’t outgrow.” Plus, he is attentive to safety and a regular at the meetings of the International Window Cleaners Association, the industry’s trade group.

Because New York is tougher than most places when it comes to washing windows — the traffic, the congestion, the pollution — city window washers use a variety of techniques to get to where the dirt is. They clamber up scaffolding. They use ropes to rappel down the sides of high-rises, an approach that most are loath to discuss or have abandoned because city regulations sharply curtailed the practice. Like Mr. Weingard, they work as much as possible inside an apartment, using what is called belt work only for hard-to-reach exteriors.

Ivor Hanson, the author of the memoir “Life on the Ledge: Reflections of a New York City Window Cleaner,” is intimately familiar with the world Mr. Weingard inhabits. All the glassy new towers translate into business. “But when times are tight,” Mr. Hanson said, “people wash their windows less often, so there’s more pressure on the window washer.”

As the city has grown more affluent, the social dynamics have changed also. “People are fussier,” Mr. Weingard said. “They get upset if they can’t get an appointment right away, or if the guy is five minutes late.” There’s also less chatting with the customer; usually, a domestic worker or a doorman escorts Mr. Weingard into an apartment. Today, he said, most people have their windows washed once or twice a year, paying him an average of $20 apiece for normal double-hung windows, more for larger or more complicated installations.

Like many window washers, Mr. Weingard does not plan to do this sort of work forever. Crouching and balancing become tougher; the lightning-fast reflexes needed to prevent falls slow down. Mr. Weingard sees himself retiring to his family’s farm in the Allegheny Mountains.

But for now, he regards washing the windows of what he calls “my buildings” as something of a calling. “Because why live in New York,” he said, “if you can’t look out the window and see how beautiful the city is?”

Bird Turd Jesus

Bird Turd Jesus: Ohio Man Jim Lawry Says Dropping On His Windshield Is Image Of Christ - It isn't the Shroud of Turin. It's the Turd of Brooklyn. Jim Lawry of Brooklyn, Ohio, tells NewsNet5 that he's "amazed" by the image of Jesus Christ that he, family and friends see in a bird poop plopped on his windshield. He told the station he thinks it's a sign. In a YouTube video posted Monday, Lawry marveled at how it looked like a regular old dropping from the outside of the car -- but from the inside it looked, well, divine. The video has since been deleted. "It's like a perfect portrait," he says in the video. "It's like Jesus staring right at me."

MSN writes that it looks more like a "dog wearing a wig" than the Son of God, and is perhaps more a sign that the car needs washing. But sometimes one bird's excrement can mean one human's excitement. In August, Brandon Tudor of Illinois spotted a turd on his windshield that he thought was a dead ringer for Michael Jackson. But Tudor's plan to auction it on eBay washed away in the rain.

Window Cleaner Finds Miracle In Malaysia. Click picture to go to story.

Check out some reasons for miracles here.

Check out more sacred sightings..

Chuck Rickman photographed this window at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego after seeing what he thought might be the image of Jesus. He's not religious so he thinks it could also be Led Zeppelin.

Jim Stevens stands next to his truck that has an image on the window resembling Jesus Christ. Stevens, of Jonesborough, Tenn., said Nov. 2 that the image keeps reappearing, but he doesn't know how or why.

Virgin Mary in Window -- Sept. 30, 2008
Hundreds of believers and curious spectators ventured to Mercy Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., on Sept. 30, 2008, for a glimpse of what some said looked like an image of the Virgin Mary in a window.

Visitors believed they saw a white apparition of Mary in a third floor window at a hospital in Milton, Mass., in 2003.

Fake Window Washing & Other High Flying Stunts

An Ad in Tallinn Center, Estonia, with fake window-washers.

Fake window cleaner arrested near Queen’s palace: About 30 people have become victims of the fake window cleaner who was active in The Hague, Rijswijk and Delft. The man was arrested on Saturday by the Royal Military Police in the Haagse Bos. The fake window cleaner rang doorbells and asked residents for money for cleaning windows. But in reality he did nothing. The police warned residents several times about a man in an un-groomed appearance with bad teeth. The Royal Military Police noticed the ‘window cleaner’ near the Queen’s residence of Huis ten Bosch when they approached and arrested him.

Greenpeace Shames Apple With, Um, Fake Window-Washing.. you may remember this one from a previous blog here. Greenpeace had upped the ante in its fight to get Apple to commit to using more renewable energy in its data centers. Or at least it tried to up the ante.

To highlight the extreme quality of sponges, Scotch-Brite, a brand of 3M, used a window cleaning platform and turned it into a huge sponge. The effect could be seen by passers-by near a building of the legendary Santiago Bernabeu stadium in Madrid. Only nobody told them that green pads scratch glass.

Web of Lies by Mark Tisdale: This blotchy photo (obviously saved and re-saved a number of times, a sure tip off for a questionable story) is purported to be of window washers at a Children’s hospital in London. Note all the missing details – what hospital for instance? As far as I was able to deduce in a grand 5 minutes of web searching is that this is actually a Shanghai Sheraton Hotel! Granted this is taking the word of another website that could be equally misinformed, but the fact that this story appears back in 2008 and the only time I find this photo associated with the children’s hospital story is this year makes me suspect the more recent version. I’m surprised for a change that a little more digging shows there’s a kernel of truth. I found this article on a Southwark newspaper’s site from 2010 showing a completely different photo with far more details about a superhero duo of window washers at the Evelina Hospital. Ladies and gentlemen, those are the heroes you’re looking for!

DIY Brooklyn Man On A Ledge Cleans His Own Damn Windows: Look, not everyone can afford professionals to come wash their precious windows, with their fancy safety equipment and insurance. Sometimes you've just got to climb out on a ledge with a couple rags and DO IT YOURSELF. The fastidious fellow in this video knows what we're talking about—after all, why do architects put ledges on buildings if people aren't meant to climb out there? 

The witness who took this video says the man was cleaning the windows on the third floor ledge for approximately 20 minutes, "with my entire office gasping and holding our breath." Out tipster, tells us the building is located on the corner of Washington and Front Streets in DUMBO, and adds, "I can't believe he couldn't see all 50 of us pressed to the window watching. It was nuts and we haven't seen him do it since." We can only conclude that while our mystery man isn't afraid of heights, it really freaks him out when people stare at him.

Window Washers Enjoy Surge In Demand

Vasyli Ivaniuk of Prime Window Cleaning working at an apartment building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Window Washers Enjoy Surge in Demand: On an average workday, Mikhail Karalatov might watch a person play music in the living room, though he won’t be able to hear the notes. He could peer into a “15-room castle” on Fifth Avenue, he said, though he isn’t really supposed to look around. Or he might draw smiley faces with soapsuds as a child stares back at him in fascination. Oftentimes, people wave. “And sometimes people cover their eyes and run away,” Mr. Karalatov said. “They are scared for you.” That is because Mr. Karalatov is a window washer, and he generally encounters these things while dangling several stories above the sidewalk, rubbing and scrubbing to make the skyline sparkle. In recent years, Mr. Karalatov and his colleagues have become increasingly popular.

In the average apartment building clad in brick or limestone, windows can be washed from the inside, perhaps by a superintendent looking to make an extra buck. The façade is generally cleaned somewhere between every 40 years and never. But glass buildings must be washed about twice a year, lest they look as if they were covered with giant smudged thumbprints, and the windows on a towering residential building, 50, 60, even 70 stories above the ground, are far too dangerous for the casual cleaner. So as recent architectural trends around the city have spawned apartment buildings both taller and glassier than in years past, at least one profession has been made very happy.

“It’s perfect, I would say,” said Mark Imankulov, a manager of Prime Window Cleaning, where Mr. Karalatov is employed. "Everybody wants a big picture window with a huge piece of glass.” Robin Domanski, the manager of Chelsea Window Cleaning, agreed that its services were becoming more vital. “It’s not just about going in, putting on booties and tilting the windows anymore,” Ms. Domanski said. “The jobs are a lot more complicated now. Equipment needs to be bought and maintained, and people have to be trained on it.”

Window cleaning is, by its nature, a slightly awkward job. Tom Bulawa, manager of Apple Window Cleaning, likens the experience to avoiding eye contact on the subway. Typically, most residents are warned that there will be visitors dangling outside their bedrooms, and unless a resident waves first, Mr. Bulawa said, washers must keep their heads down and try not to notice what’s happening on the other side. But sometimes, others say, it cannot be helped. A window washer named Mykhaylo Lazar said that on one job he had seen a couple in an intimate encounter. “I saw it, too,” said his colleague Vasyli Ivaniuk, who added, “It’s a good job, a really good job.”

Window washers reach their perches in a variety of ways. There are tapered ladders and baskets hung from cherry pickers. In many older buildings, washers climb out a window wearing a special belt that attaches to hooks on either side. In larger new buildings, a scaffold platform is kept on the roof and can be lowered, like a terrifying open-air elevator, when it is time to tidy up the sides. Another approach is to rappel off the roof clipped into what looks like a padded swing. “Sometimes people see us and they say, ‘If you gave me a million dollars, I wouldn’t do what you do,’” said Dmitriy Chuyeshkov, a sturdy, blond 30-year-old who has been washing windows eight years. “But I would!" Unfortunately, he continued, no one has offered him quite that sum.

Generally, window washers make in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 per hour. Union workers, who are concentrated in commercial cleaning, start at $26 per hour. The time spent on a job can add up quickly. The Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle takes two crews about three months to clean, and New York by Gehry, a 76-story rental tower on Spruce Street with rippling stainless-steel siding, takes six to nine months, depending on the weather — cleaning crews will stay indoors if conditions are too windy, for example. (Extell Development Company declined to describe its plans for washing windows at its One57 project, which at 90 stories will be the tallest residential building in the city when it is completed.)

Professionals say that a large job requiring several weeks of work might pay $50,000, and even a stout, five-story glass building that takes four days might be worth $5,000 or $6,000. Pricing, they say, depends on man-hours, equipment and the relative danger of the project. And there can be dangers, indeed. In December 2007, two brothers who were washing windows on the Upper East Side plummeted 47 stories to the ground, killing one but remarkably, not the other. A few months later, a man fell 12 stories to his death. And just last week, two window washers got stuck on a scaffold about 40 stories above Avenue of the Americas in Midtown. Firefighters had to cut through the building’s glass siding to get them down.

“Window cleaning is dangerous,” Ms. Domanski of Chelsea Window Cleaning said. “Any which way, you’re hanging out a window.” While the systems for hoisting cleaners into position and keeping them safe once they get there have grown more elaborate, Ms. Domanski said, other equipment used on the job has remained constant: The squeegee, the rag and their humble brethren have yet to be improved upon. “We use Joy soap,” she said. “Dishwashing detergent is the best thing to clean glass.”

The Loneliness Of The Skyscraper Window Washer

 

The Loneliness of the Skyscraper Window-Washer: "He was strapped to a window frame just a few feet under the huge clock.  The cold of a November morning swept away from the gilded dome of the Williamsburgh Savings Bank above him.  He shifted his weight.  The wind snapped at the chamois strung around his neck. Below, toy-like cars and tiny figures wove a crazy pattern in front of the Long Island Rail Road station."

This vivid, poetic storyline from the November 16, 1952 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle describes not the antics of some real-life Spiderman, but rather the daily grind of one humble 34-year-old New Yorker, Ed Kemp.

Kemp was an employee of the Standard House and Window Cleaning Company, on 126 Broadway in Brooklyn; a window-washer with seven years experience under his belt.  His particular task at the Williamsburg Savings Bank was a cruelly sisyphean one - on the first of every month, he started cleaning the topmost window on the 43-story building, and slowly wound his way downward, washing window after window after window by hand so that, weather permitting, he would have cleaned all 1,100 windows by the end of the month.  His reward for completing this herculean task?  Starting over again at the top of the building for another long, spiralling descent.

Grease pencil marks the spot, as Kemp dangles hundreds of feet above downtown Brooklyn.

In its half-page story, the Eagle paints a surprisingly thoughtful portrait of Kemp and his solitary life in the sky.  Gone is the newspaper's usual brisk and boisterous tone, replaced in this piece with sometimes wistful, sometimes reverent prose. 

Describing Kemp, the Eagle reporter Vic Timoner, writes, "he only spoke when he was sure of what he was saying...he only moved when he was sure of where he was moving." Kemp emerges as a quietly heroic figure, a "husky six-footer" who without complaint braved dizzying heights in service to the strangers he saw only through a glass, darkly.  Gazing in on men and women working, talking, laughing, living, he remained always separated from them by those hundreds of window panes, suspended in his own quiet, windy limbo.

While Timoner portrays the work of a window cleaner as a grimly noble struggle against ambient dirt and pigeon dung, the job was also an inherently dangerous one.  As the pictures show, Kemp was held up only by a harness belt that clamped onto a window frame with no scaffolding or platform to support him.  Earlier Eagle articles show that even these meager safety measures were hard-won.
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A brief article from November 3, 1929 describes a protest march to City Hall, attended by five hundred unionized window cleaners. In addition to demanding a ten percent pay increase, they wanted the city to take action against building owners who had yet to install safety hooks on building exteriors. They had lost 84 members of their ranks to fatal falls since 1928.

Another article, from 1937, describes the harrowing experience of one cleaner, James Osman, whose safety belt broke while he was washing panes on a building in Manhattan. He dangled sixteen stories in the air, above a crowd of 2,500 gawkers, until a plucky telephone operator found a seven-foot pole to offer out the window to Osman. He was pulled to safety, and a generous superintendent gave him the rest of the day off.

Not so lucky was George Urban, who fell seventeen floors in January of 1944.  His lifeless body was found on a protruding extension of an office building on Tuesday the 18th, two days after his wife reported to police that he hadn't come home from his window washing job.  That same year, state legislators enacted a new, stricter safety code to protect workers.  This required old, rusted anchor bolts on the exterior of buildings to be replaced with non-corrosive ones, so that cleaners could trust the supports to which they strapped their safety belts.  Building owners had difficulty complying with the code, however, because of wartime shortages in materials.  A New York Times article from November 18, 1945 reported that skyscraper windows had gone unwashed since July of that year as window washers awaited the installment of safer anchors and hooks.  A dirty pall fell over the high-rises of New York City.

Even after buildings were brought up to code, the life of a window washer was full of hazards - not the least of which was human error.  In March of 1946, one Brooklyn cleaner fell four stories to his death after forgetting to fasten his safety belt. What of our man in the sky, Ed Kemp?  Did he harbor a fear of falling?  Ever stoic, he replied, "I wouldn't be up here if I was afraid."  It seems for him the greater danger was loneliness.  Kemp said of his job, "It's a good life.  Lonely.  But you see people, even if you don't speak to them.  They're sociable enough but they kind of look at you like they feel sorry for you."

Safety Harnesses Save Two Window Cleaners - New York

FDNY makes Brooklyn rescue of window washers hangin' by a prayer: Two window washers were left dangling 30 feet above a Brooklyn street Monday when the scaffolding they were standing on collapsed in high winds. Antonio Rojas, 47, and Carlos Caseres (pictured left), 41, were both wearing their safety harnesses, preventing them from plummeting to the Flatlands street more than three stories below. "My first instinct was to grab the rope and stay calm," said Rojas, who has been washing windows for 26 years. "That's what you have to do ... If you lose your calmness, that's when things go wrong." The wooden, manually operated scaffolding was connected to the roof of the Kings Highway building by a pair of ropes, one of which gave way just before 2 p.m. on the blustery early spring day. As their frantic co-workers called 911, the two men could only pray the remaining rope would hold as they clung to it for nearly 15 minutes. "No one wants to die like this," said Rojas. "We're lucky this time."
Firefighters secured the men with a second rope from the roof. They then used a ladder to reach the men and pull them to safety. "The scaffolding was like a trap door and it gave way," said Chief Donald Howard of Battalion 33. "Without the harness, they would have fallen and landed on a metal picket fence."
The Buildings Department issued two violations to the building owner for use of rigging equipment without a rigger's license and failure to safeguard all persons and property during construction operations, officials said.