A 40-foot strip of the brick facade along the roof of the building housing sculptor Michael Garman’s galleries in Old Colorado City collapsed into the street Friday, narrowly missing shoppers strolling through the historic district on the mild, sunny afternoon.

The bricks peeled off from the parapet atop the 105-year-old building at 2418 W. Colorado Ave., on the corner of Colbrunn Court across from Bancroft Park.

“We were very lucky no one was hurt,” Colorado Springs Fire Department Lt. Julie Stone said. The collapse happened at 1:22 p.m., she said.

A block of Colorado Avenue around the collapse was closed Friday night and would remain cordoned off until a barricade around the sidewalk in front of the gallery could be erected, Stone said.

“I was standing here looking out the window and I heard the bricks release,” said Charlie Irwin, owner of The Attic, a gift shop at 2421 W. Colorado Ave., across the street from the Garman gallery. “It was like a crackling sound, maybe like a big tree branch break. Of course once it hit the ground, it sounded like it was an explosion.”

“There was so much dust you couldn’t see the building for a minute or two,” Irwin said.

Vanessa Garman, the chief operating officer for the gallery, said the roof of the building had recently been replaced.

“They delivered a few flatbeds of roofing supplies up there this past week,” said Diane Dimbat, manager of Thunder & Buttons tavern across the street at 2415 W. Colorado Ave.

“They’ve been working on it for about two weeks,” Irwin said. “Something weakened something.”

Weather also may have played a role. Curtis Martinell of the Pikes Peak Regional Building Department said a roof inspection that had been scheduled for Friday, “but because of the icy conditions this morning they cancelled the inspection.”

Michael Garman is retiring and plans to close the gallery and sell the building in the coming months. He was planning to hold a final signing of his sculptures this weekend.

“Fortunately, nobody got hurt,” Vanessa Garman said. “If this happened tomorrow, there would have been lines of people outside.”

Several witnesses reported that a window-shopping couple narrowly missed being struck by the falling bricks. “He saw it, pushed his wife into the street, and he dove out of the way,” said Andrew Pierson, a waiter at Thunder and Buttons. “It was really close.”

The building itself appears to be structurally sound, but the masonry is not, Martinell said.

“The mortar is powder,” he said. “It’s not going to be OK to go back in the building because there’s going to have to be much more of the parapet that’s going to have to come down first.”

The block on which the gallery sits was heavily damaged by a fire that started in a candle shop on Dec. 11, 2002. Four stores were gutted but firefighters managed to halt it before it reached Garman’s building, which was built in 1903.

Stone said the fire nearly six years ago did not appear to have anything to do with Friday’s collapse.

Gazette reporter Andrew Wineke contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: 476-1654 or dean.toda@gazettedev.gazette.com

Colorado Springs police cordoned off the area around 2231 East Platte Avenue. Photo by BRIAN NEWSOME/THE GAZETTE