Everyone’s had their fun at the expense of Ulanda Williams, the 400-pound Queens woman who fell into an Upper East Side basement when the city sidewalk beneath her gave way.
The Fire Department lifted Williams out with the help of a rescue crane. She told The Post that a thinner person might have suffered even more from the fall.
Set aside the fat jokes, though, and her fall points to something even more serious than the two breaks in her arm. As the laughter fades and the litigation starts, her fellow Gothamites might come to see the sidewalk that crumbled below Williams as a metaphor for the city’s distressing abdication of responsibility for its public places.
Now, City Hall has a right to expect that those who own buildings will take reasonable steps to maintain the walks in front of them. But a law passed in 2003 goes much further: It effectively transferred legal liability for sidewalks from the city to the property owner.
The reason? The city was being ripped off by personal-injury lawyers filing “slip and fall” cases. As Mayor Bloomberg rightly complained, these were often frivolous and always costly.
The problem with the 2003 law is that, instead of correcting the abuse, it simply moved the bull’s-eye to building owners.
The mayor admitted as much when he explained the impact on the plaintiffs’ bar this way: “You could still sue, but the owners of the building company and their insurance companies are the ones you would sue, so tort lawyers don’t have to worry about sending their kids on expensive vacations.”
It strikes us that this “solution” is of a piece with New York’s approach in too many areas. However many dollars this law may have saved the city, it has done so at the price of making doing business in New York more costly and litigious.
The sidewalk that collapsed under Williams makes clear that hers is no frivolous case. Neither is what New York’s sidewalk law says about the way the city meets its responsibilities.