One of Toronto’s most notorious buildings is coming apart at the seams — literally.

Residents of the Toronto Community Housing complex were shocked Saturday afternoon after four storeys of brick facing suddenly peeled away from the side of their east-end apartment building and rained to the ground.

“This building should be condemned,” said Lisa Donsmuir, who has lived in the Scarborough complex for seven years.

“Honest to God, this is a terrible place to live.”

And the crumbling bricks are just the latest in a long list of woes for the small cluster of buildings near Eglinton Ave. E and Markham Rd.

There was a shooting in the fall that left 22-year-old father Dillon Phillips dead. Gunfire that erupted in a stairwell last month sent a 16-year-old to hospital. Throughout the winter, tenants battled burst pipes, water damage and went without electricity during last year’s ice storm.

For some residents, it’s too much to take.

Amanda Basine, 38, a recent immigrant and single mother, looked at the police tape surrounding the rubble and shook her head. She wondered aloud about what could have happened if her children, or someone else, had been nearby when the walls started to crumble.

“What if something happened?” she said. “This is a really big thing. This is our life.”

Around 1 p.m. Saturday police got several calls from residents of 3171 Eglinton Ave. E. reporting “gunshots, explosions and a huge bang,” said Staff. Sgt. Rob Tobin of 43 Division.

When officers arrived they discovered that hundreds of bricks, from a 15- to 20-foot-wide portion of the exterior wall, had fallen to the ground at the south end of 3171 Eglinton Ave. E.

The jagged pile of broken bricks landed on a small, sunny patch of land dotted with dumpsters and a somewhat concealed pedestrian entrance to the building. It’s “not an area that’s really well-travelled, Tobin said. No one was injured.

Dunsmuir felt the floor shake beneath her feet and thought there was an “earthquake” when the bricks started to fall.

She rushed outside with her dog and saw that part of her building was resting on the quiet patch of grass where she often sits.

Tiyarah Brown, 16, wasn’t home when the wall began to fall, but rushed inside when she head the news and noticed that the bricks had grazed her seventh-floor window.

She isn’t hopeful someone will come to clean it up, or make the situation safe, she said, because like every other problem at the complex, nobody notices anything or “cares when all these bad things happen.”

Arielle Jackson, 24, said that whenever anything untoward happens at the apartment buildings, management does a quick, patchwork fix — something temporary to make residents stop complaining. But no one addresses the real problems, she said. And that’s why “this whole place is going to fall down,” she added.

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City Councillor Gary Crawford (open Gary Crawford's policard) heard the news on Twitter and rushed to the scene Saturday to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.

The falling bricks weren’t caused by structural issues, he said, and engineers at the scene were in the midst of trying to figure out what to do next.

The rest of the facing on the 12-storey building was leaning, perilously, like a strip of wallpaper about to peel entirely off the wall.

“Bottom line is that it’s a safety issue,” he said.

When asked about the plight of the residents in this complex and how this building appears to be one of the worst, most beleaguered in the city, Crawford said it is one of many that need to be addressed.

The city is struggling to deal with a backlog of repairs and a task force has been put in place to deal with this “huge pressure.”

As of late Saturday, police left the scene, Tobin said, and Toronto Community Housing took over.

It looks like “there is more to come,” Tobin said, referring to the rest of the wall’s brick facing.

For now, residents are crossing their fingers that it stays in place — or is taken down and repaired properly.

“Apparently, this building used to be really nice,” said Jackson. “Now I think it should be torn down, but then we’d have nowhere to go.”