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The cry for help came from seven stories high. Passers-by could only watch, frozen and powerless, their Monday suddenly fraught with worry.

“I’m going to fall!” a man repeatedly said in Spanish as he clung to the scaffolding that dangled against a building on East 50th Street in Manhattan.

The man had been struck in the head and bloodied by a heavy piece of molding while repairing the building’s masonry. Although authorities rescued him from the scaffold, he would die later at a hospital at 51 years old.

Amid New York’s towering buildings, where scaffolding is so common it seemingly blends into the design, the man’s death offered a reminder of the risks faced by workers in a city under constant construction.