Early on Tuesday, two window washers who had been stuck on scaffolding outside a Times Square high-rise were pulled safely inside the building. Within hours of that rescue, a second emergency call came in about a window washer. But that window washer, Robert Domaszowec, 49, had fallen to his death from a 17-story building on Fifth Avenue where he had worked for 20 years. At his side were a sponge and a squeegee, tools of the trade he inherited from his father.
The two episodes spotlighted a perilous job that is a part of New York City’s fabric, along with the people who do it — often immigrants, handing the trade down from father to son.
When Ulana Illiano, a family friend of Mr. Domaszowec’s, learned of his death, it brought back childhood memories of her own father, a Ukrainian immigrant, and the other Ukrainian men who, like him, worked as window washers. “It is like the mythology of the job, where people would fall,” said Mrs. Illiano, 43, who grew up in a close-knit Ukrainian immigrant community on the Lower East Side. “When I heard it happened to him, it was devastating,” she said of Mr. Domaszowec. “It is the next generation.” Mr. Domaszowec’s wife, Tracey, 47, said that her husband’s father, also an immigrant from Ukraine, had washed windows for 27 years. Mr. Domaszowec started working as a window washer in 1985, joining the union, she said. “People don’t realize that being married to a window cleaner is very much like being married to a fireman or a policeman,” she said, sitting with her daughter, Larissa, 18, and son, Alex, 12, in the garden outside of their house in Kerhonkson, N.Y., in Ulster County. Sgt. Michael P. Edwards, who helped rescue the workers trapped on Tuesday at 3 Times Square, said that rescuing window washers is one of Emergency Service Unit’s most challenging operations, along with facing down gunmen and trying to talk someone out of committing suicide. The role of window washers in the city has become more crucial, as the robust pace of building continues to add new glass-clad towers to the skyline. But the beauty of the soaring glass has come at a fatal cost for some. In December, two brothers fell 47 stories from their window-washing scaffolding off an Upper East Side building. One died. The other was critically injured but survived. And in August, two window cleaners fell to their deaths from a cherry picker at the World Financial Center.
Those two deaths were the first in 25 years that involved union window cleaners, said Matt Nerzig, a spokesman for the union, Local 32BJ. During that same time, nonunion workers have had about 200 accidents, including more than 70 fatalities, he said. Mr. Domaszowec’s death, coming so soon after the fatal accidents in August, suggests “that industry standards may not be high enough, or may not be not adequately adhered to by all window cleaners,” Mr. Nerzig said. “Higher standards and enforcement of these higher standards clearly needs to be given higher priority by everyone involved.” He added, “This is one of the most dangerous jobs in the city.”
Mr. Domaszowec, who worked for a window-cleaning company called Techni-Clean Corp., would also do independent jobs, his wife said. On Tuesday, he was working at 40 Fifth Avenue, a building where he had often worked before. He had cleaned the windows of the same 12th-floor apartment from which he fell as recently as last June, Mrs. Domaszowec said. Witnesses, including other workers, said that Mr. Domaszowec had been wearing a harness when he fell.
Usually, his wife said, he would strap his harness into two bolts on opposite sides of the window, and lean out the window with his feet braced along the ledge. Mr. Domaszowec was diligent about safety, his wife said. “He had yearly inspections of his equipment and always made sure that everything was in great shape. He never took his safety for granted at all,” she said. But she was told by the police that new windows had recently been installed in that apartment, and it seemed that the bolts had been “cut through,” weakening them to the point that they did not hold. An official close to the investigation said the bolts had been “compromised.”
Kate Lindquist, a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings, said on Wednesday that the department was in the process of issuing a citation over a failure to maintain the exterior of the building wall. She said the bolts were part of the investigation. Some workers blame recent architectural trends for some of the job’s hazards. Clean-lined, rectangular high-rises are much easier to maneuver window-washing machines along than ones with rounded edges, said Cesar Sanchez, 56, of Washington Heights. “They design the buildings to look wonderful,” said Mr. Sanchez, who has been a window washer in Manhattan for more than three decades. “But they need to make them safer.” Even those who clean windows the old-fashioned way, with a soapy squeegee and a metal ladder sticking to lower floors, like Joaquin Olivero (pictured), 39, of Woodside, Queens recognize that it can be dangerous. Mr. Olivero was perched 22 ladder rungs above East 46th Street, while Oscar Pineda, 47, a colleague from Astoria, clutched the ladder’s base, as pedestrians strolled just inches behind him. “Life continues,” he said. “We must work.” Like many of the city’s building trades, industry, window washing is often passed down within families. That tradition often fosters solidarity among laborers. Mrs. Illiano’s father, Alexander Rynczak, immigrated to New York City in the 1950s and did not speak English well. He did odd jobs until he found work as a window washer, along with other Ukrainian immigrants. “They lived within a five-block radius. It was a little solidarity, a little group of window washers whose lives revolved around each other. It was such a strong bond,” she said. “It was the sort of thing where you passed the baton to your child.” As a child, she would hear her father prepare for work, knowing that he would be climbing on buildings in the cold winter wind that she could hear whipping outside. He came home every day for lunch with red, cracked hands. He spoke of fellow workers who tumbled to their deaths, she said. As a child, Mrs. Illiano and her family went on retreats in upstate New York with other Ukrainian families, including Mr. Domaszowec’s. On Monday, the day before he died, Mr. Domaszowec drove his daughter to Ithaca College, where she was starting as a freshman studying sociology. On Tuesday morning, he woke at 2:50 a.m. to make the 100-mile drive to wash windows in New York City, where he typically worked three days a week. “The last thing I said to him was, ‘Come on, you have to get up.’ I regret I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye,” his wife said.
