The Upper West Side’s most talked-about grocery store can’t seem to catch a break. Ten days after reopening from a months-long remodel, it’s back in the news, and this time shoppers ended up in the hospital.
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The FDNY received a call at 2:38 p.m. on Tuesday reporting that people had fallen less than five feet “due to an escalator” at 2073 Broadway, the Trader Joe’s at West 72nd Street. EMS took two people to Mount Sinai West with minor, non-life-threatening injuries, according to the FDNY, which didn’t release any other information about the people involved.The store reopened on September 12 after a renovation that Trader Joe’s said would upgrade its refrigeration and “vertical transportation,” meaning its escalators and elevators. It had been closed since May 17.
Word of Tuesday’s accident first surfaced on Reddit, where a user posted that they’d seen a few people severely injured at the store and wondered if it was “an escalator situation.” A commenter who said they were there wrote that the escalators were working fine. According to that commenter, an elderly woman wearing a large cast on her foot and lower leg lost her balance near the top of an up escalator and fell backward, landing on the people below her in what they described as a domino effect. One of them, a middle-aged man, cut his leg and knee on the escalator steps, the commenter wrote, adding that it took some time for the escalator to be turned off. While everyone waited for EMS, the escalator was blocked off and shoppers had to use the stairs.
Another commenter who said they were checking out when it happened wrote that four or five people were hurt, most of them elderly, but said they weren’t sure whether someone fell backward or the escalator malfunctioned. A third said they’d been in the store shortly before and heard workers complaining that the elevator was broken. None of these accounts could be independently confirmed, and the FDNY’s report only mentions the two people taken to the hospital.
The accident comes a week after shoppers complained about empty shelves and a broken escalator in the store’s first days back open.
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