City investigators found that the facade of an Upper West Side building where a 2-year-old tot was killed by a falling brick had been neglected for years through phony safety reports and by city officials who ignored obvious signs of decay.

Maqsood Faruqi, 55, of Blue Print Engineering, allegedly filled out a fake inspection report in 2011, calling the facade of The Esplanade Manhattan assisted-living facility “safe” even though he’d never been to the site.

The licensed engineer was arrested Tuesday and charged in Manhattan Supreme Court with one count of offering a false instrument for filing and released without bail.

He was doing the work for D&N Construction, which had been hired by the West End Avenue nursing home’s owners, who had been fined several times for failing to submit a facade report.

Faruqi came forward with the truth only after the tragic death of Greta Greene, who died in May after masonry from an eighth-story window ledge fell on her head as she was sitting on a bench with her grandmother, prosectors said.

“Far too often, licensed professionals cut corners and break the law, which puts at risk the safety of others,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said.

But there were other glaring warnings about the safety of the dilapidated facade, according to a 12-page report issued by Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark G. Peters.

Just over a year before Greene’s death, a piece of the building’s facade plunged to the sidewalk — an event that was recorded in the nursing home’s front-desk diary.

But no one notified the Department of Buildings about the crumbling stone.

In October 2014, a private consultant who was inspecting a facade adjacent to The Esplanade sent e-mails to the DOB saying he saw a “scary” crack on the building — and even warned them to “get someone over pretty quick on this.”

A member of the DOB’s facades unit acknowledged the e-mails but forwarded one of them to a supervising inspector who apparently never opened it. No one was ever sent out to the building.

The DOI’s investigation also found that 1,000 New York City buildings still haven’t filed facade-inspection reports that were due two years ago.

Faruqi’s defense attorney, Joseph Lo Piccole, told The Post: “There wasn’t any criminal law, penal-law code or city code that was violated in any actions by Mr. Faruqi’s company.”