A sofa.

“Crashing down,” Ms. Mejia said this week. She thought of the man again. “One more minute and he would have been hit. Everybody was just like, ‘What?’ ”

Next door to Patisserie Claude is a dry cleaner. A worker inside said he did not see the sofa fall, but he heard it land.

“Only, ‘boom!’ ” he said. “Big, very big sofa. And all inside-out. The stuff. That’s all I saw.”

The incident tapped into a fear wired into humans who live near tall buildings, New Yorkers being no exception. Things fall. Beams fall off high construction sites in the wind. Air-conditioners slip from clumsy hands. It has been said that a penny dropped from the top of the Empire State Building would pierce a pedestrian’s skull like a bullet.

But a sofa? Not from an apartment building on busy, upscale West Fourth Street in the Village.

The patisserie, the dry cleaner and a boutique called Considerosity occupy the first-floor storefronts in an eight-story apartment building. A resident of the building recalled recently that he had arrived at the patisserie soon after the sofa fell. “I’m like, ‘Really?’ ” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety. “ ‘Maybe somebody put it there.’ ”