The law that applies to your claim
Sidewalk liability changes at the city line
Outside New York City, a fall on a public sidewalk is generally the municipality’s responsibility. Inside it, NYC Administrative Code §7-210 shifted that liability onto the owner of the abutting property — with a narrow exemption for owner-occupied buildings of one to three families used only as residences. The same fall therefore produces a claim against a private landlord in Brooklyn and against a village in Westchester. Different defendant, different insurer, different deadline.
The Pothole Law
For a defect in a City street or a City-maintained sidewalk, §7-201(c)(2) generally bars the claim unless the City had prior written notice of that specific defect and failed to repair it within fifteen days, or created the defect itself. What the City knew, and when, is frequently the whole case. It is established through DOT records and the historic Big Apple maps, and it has no equivalent in most of Westchester.
🔴 Ninety days — and the transit system is on its own clock
Against the City, NYC Health + Hospitals, the Department of Education or the DOT, a notice of claim within 90 days is generally required under General Municipal Law §50-e, with suit within one year and 90 days. The subway and the buses are a separate entity: under Public Authorities Law §1212, a claim against the New York City Transit Authority carries its own notice and its own one-year-and-90-day limit. A case against a bus is not a case against the City, and serving the wrong one does not stop either clock.
Where a New York City case is actually heard
Each borough is its own county with its own Supreme Court, and under CPLR §504(3) a claim against the City is generally brought in the county where it arose.
- Bronx County — 851 Grand Concourse
- Kings County (Brooklyn) — 360 Adams Street
- New York County (Manhattan) — 60 Centre Street
- Queens County — 88-11 Sutphin Boulevard, Jamaica
- Richmond County (Staten Island) — 26 Central Avenue
Which courthouse a case lands in is not a formality. Calendars, time to trial and jury pools differ substantially between them.
Where a private defendant is involved rather than the City, venue can instead follow residence, which is how a case can be heard in a borough other than the one the injury happened in. One of our own results worked exactly that way: a Brooklyn resident injured while cleaning a newsroom in Manhattan.
The Bronx
The Bronx is the borough we are closest to, and not only geographically. Its northern line runs against Yonkers and Mount Vernon, and a great many people live on one side of it and work, drive, or are treated on the other. Bronx claims have been part of this firm’s work for as long as it has existed.
The roads. The Cross Bronx Expressway carries interstate freight through short merges and constant lane changes on an alignment cut through dense neighborhoods. The Major Deegan runs the western edge, the Bruckner interchange knots three highways together, and the Hutchinson River Parkway runs straight up into Westchester on a 1930s parkway design. The Grand Concourse carries heavy pedestrian volume across wide signalized intersections.
Where people are treated. Jacobi and Lincoln are both NYC Health + Hospitals facilities. That matters beyond the medical record: a malpractice claim against either is a claim against a public benefit corporation and carries the 90-day notice requirement rather than the ordinary malpractice period. St. Barnabas and Montefiore take much of the rest.
Our Bronx results. The firm’s largest reported recovery is a Bronx case — $8,175,000 for two men shot at by an off-duty NYPD officer who had been drinking after training at the department’s Rodman’s Neck facility. A second, $4,900,000, was for a man who was struck in the head by a dry-ice container being moved by an untrained forklift operator across a public sidewalk that had never been cordoned off. He died of the injury. Both are on our case results page.
Brooklyn
Our New York City office is in Brooklyn, at 26 Court Street.
Kings County is the most populous borough, and its claims divide fairly cleanly between the highways, the arterials and the buildings.
The roads. The Belt Parkway is a 1940s parkway carrying modern volume on tight curves and short merges, with limited run-off along the shoreline stretch. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is structurally constrained through Brooklyn Heights, where the triple cantilever has been speed-restricted and weight-restricted for years. Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue run fast arterial traffic through heavy pedestrian volume.
Why §7-210 matters more here. Brooklyn’s housing stock is exactly the mix the statute turns on. Whether a building is an owner-occupied one-to-three family used only as a residence decides whether a sidewalk fall is a claim against the owner or against the City — and the two routes have entirely different proof requirements and different deadlines. Establishing the ownership and occupancy of the abutting property is usually the first task in a Brooklyn sidewalk case, not an afterthought.
Construction. Brooklyn carries an enormous volume of mid-rise residential work, much of it heavily subcontracted. That is the profile that produces falls from height and the Labor Law §240 claims that go with them.
Where people are treated. Kings County Hospital Center is an H+H facility, with Maimonides, Brookdale and NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist taking much of the remainder.
Queens
Queens is the largest borough by area and the most car-dependent of the inner four, and it produces a correspondingly road-heavy claim mix.
The roads. Queens Boulevard earned the name “Boulevard of Death” for its pedestrian toll before the DOT redesigns, and its twelve lanes and long crossings still define the hazard. The Van Wyck feeds JFK, the Grand Central Parkway runs past LaGuardia, and the Long Island Expressway crosses the entire borough.
Two airports. JFK and LaGuardia generate ground-handling, cargo and construction injuries, and they bring in the Port Authority as a defendant. The Port Authority runs on its own statute: a notice of claim served at least 60 days before suit, and suit within one year of the accident. It is shorter than anything else on this page and it is missed regularly.
Our Queens results. $2,000,000, plus a waiver of a $330,000 workers’ compensation lien, for a worker who tripped over a plumbing stub-up on a Board of Education kitchen renovation at a Queens school. The school’s lawyers argued the stub-up was integral to the construction and so not a defect at all; we answered it with a line of New York authority running back to the early 1900s, the court agreed, and the case settled. We also recovered $350,000 in Ficklin v. The Port Authority, a World Trade Center case argued on worker distraction.
Where people are treated. Elmhurst Hospital Center is an H+H facility — again, the 90-day notice — alongside Jamaica Hospital and NewYork-Presbyterian Queens.
Manhattan
New York County has the densest construction activity in the country and the densest pedestrian volume, and its claims reflect both.
Construction. Sidewalk sheds, hoists, exterior scaffolding and Local Law 11 facade work are permanent features of the streetscape. That is §240(1) and §241(6) territory, and the Department of Buildings paper trail — permits, site safety plans, ECB violations — is often where the case is proved.
Pedestrians. Turning collisions at signalized intersections and delivery-cycling volume dominate the non-construction work. Manhattan is also where §19-190 comes up most often.
Our Manhattan results. $1,100,000 for a cleaner who tripped on a masonry nail left in the floor of a newly renovated Wall Street Journal newsroom — the contractors denied installing the nails for four years, until we found the architect who had photographed them doing it. $500,000 for a demolition laborer in a three-story building in lower Manhattan, told to pull a ceiling down with a crowbar by an employer that had no demolition plan at all, which the Industrial Code requires. And the $350,000 Port Authority case at the World Trade Center.
Where people are treated. Bellevue is an H+H Level 1 trauma center, with NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell and Mount Sinai taking much of the rest.
Staten Island
Richmond County is the outlier. It has the highest household vehicle ownership in the city and the least transit, so the claim mix looks far more like suburban Westchester than like the rest of New York City: ordinary motor-vehicle collisions and premises claims rather than subway and bus cases.
The roads. The Staten Island Expressway across the north, the West Shore Expressway down the western side, Hylan Boulevard the length of the east shore, and the Verrazzano-Narrows approaches feeding all of it.
Where people are treated. Staten Island University Hospital and Richmond University Medical Center. Neither is an H+H facility, so a malpractice claim against them follows the ordinary route rather than the notice-of-claim route.
Claims are heard at Richmond County Supreme Court, 26 Central Avenue.
Construction work in the five boroughs
Construction is the strongest part of this firm’s work and New York City is where most of the state’s construction happens.
Labor Law §240(1) imposes absolute liability on owners and general contractors for gravity-related injuries where proper protection was not provided — a fall from a scaffold, a ladder, a hoist, or an object falling from above. Comparative fault is generally not a defense to it. §241(6) reaches a much wider range of site conditions through the specific commands of the Industrial Code (12 NYCRR Part 23), which is the provision our $2,000,000 Queens school case and our $500,000 Manhattan demolition case were both built on.
Local Law 196 layers a city-only requirement on top: site safety training cards for workers at most permitted sites. Whether a worker was trained, and whether the site enforced it, is discoverable and it matters.
Workers’ compensation is not the whole claim. Comp pays treatment and part of lost wages, and it bars a suit against your own employer. It does not bar a claim against anyone else — the owner, the general contractor, another trade’s subcontractor, an equipment lessor. On a city site there are almost always several. That third-party claim is where compensation for pain, suffering and future loss actually comes from, and it is the single most common reason injured workers leave money unrecovered.
More detail on our construction accident page.
Pedestrians and cyclists: a city-only offense
NYC Administrative Code §19-190 makes it a misdemeanor for a driver to fail to yield to a pedestrian or cyclist who has the right of way, where contact causes injury. No equivalent offense exists in Westchester or Rockland, and it changes what is available in the civil case: a charge, a disposition and a police record built around the failure to yield.
It sits alongside Vehicle and Traffic Law §1146, the statewide due-care obligation, and the city’s Vision Zero crash data, which is public and can establish that an intersection had a documented history before the collision.
See our pedestrian and bicycle accident pages.
Our New York City office
Our New York City office is at 26 Court Street, Brooklyn, NY 11242, in Downtown Brooklyn near the Kings County Supreme Court on Adams Street. We also have offices in White Plains, Nyack and Nanuet.
A New York bar admission is statewide, and the firm has a long record in the city’s courts. Howard Stolzenberg was admitted in the First Department in 1990, which covers Manhattan and the Bronx. Terrence Cortelli (2001) and Noah Mittman (2022) were admitted in the Second, which covers Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. Roughly half of the firm’s reported recoveries come from cases that arose in New York City.
If travel is difficult, we come to you — at home or in hospital, in any borough. The consultation is free and there is no fee unless we win.
How long you have to act
- Three years from the date of the accident for most negligence claims (CPLR §214).
- Two years for wrongful death (EPTL §5-4.1).
- 90 days to serve a notice of claim where a city, county, school district, transit authority or other public body is involved (General Municipal Law §50-e), with suit generally within one year and 90 days.
The 90-day rule is the one that quietly ends otherwise strong cases. If a public entity may be involved, that is the first thing to check — not the last.
What it costs
Nothing up front. These cases are handled on contingency: there is no fee unless we win, and the consultation is free. You will be told the percentage and how expenses are handled, in writing, before you sign anything.
Common questions
Do you have an office in New York City?
Yes. Our New York City office is at 26 Court Street in Brooklyn, near the Kings County Supreme Court. We also have offices in White Plains, Nyack and Nanuet, and we appear in the courts of all five boroughs. We will travel to you if an injury makes travel difficult.
Can a Westchester firm handle a case in the Bronx or Brooklyn?
Yes. A New York bar admission is statewide, and the Bronx line is minutes from our Westchester work. Howard Stolzenberg is admitted in the First Department (Manhattan and the Bronx); Terrence Cortelli and Noah Mittman in the Second (Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island).
I fell on a city sidewalk. Who is responsible?
Usually the owner of the property the sidewalk runs past, under NYC Administrative Code §7-210 — not the City. The exception is an owner-occupied building of one to three families used only as a residence, where responsibility can fall back to the City and the Pothole Law’s prior-written-notice requirement applies. Which route the claim takes changes both the defendant and the deadline, so it is worth establishing early.
I was hurt on a subway or a city bus. Is that a claim against the City?
No. The New York City Transit Authority is a separate entity under Public Authorities Law §1212, with its own notice of claim and its own one-year-and-90-day limit. Serving the City does not preserve a claim against the Transit Authority.
My accident was in Queens but I live in Westchester. Where would the case be heard?
It depends on who the defendant is. A claim against the City is generally brought in the borough where it arose. Where the defendant is private, venue can follow a party’s residence instead, so a case can be heard outside the borough the injury happened in.
How long do I have to bring a New York City claim?
Three years for most negligence claims, but far less where a public entity is involved: 90 days to serve a notice of claim on the City, H+H, the DOE or the Transit Authority, and only 60 days’ notice with a one-year limit against the Port Authority. If any public body may be involved, that is the first thing to check rather than the last.
Do you handle construction accidents in the city?
Yes, and it is the strongest part of our record. Labor Law §240 and §241(6) claims, including the Industrial Code arguments that decided our $2,000,000 Queens school case and our $500,000 Manhattan demolition case.
