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| At the scene of her death |
A woman jumped 20 stories to her death from a swanky rooftop bar in the Flatiron District Monday night.
As onlookers sipped pricey drinks at the 230 Fifth Rooftop Bar during a corporate party at 7:30 p.m., 30-year-old Faigy Mayer suddenly sprinted toward a row of bushes that lined the edge of the establishment, cops and onlookers said.
She went through the shrubbery, over a wall and plummeted to the sidewalk on West 27th Street, shocking pedestrians.
“I was waking across the street and I saw she was falling,” said Dale Martin, who witnessed the tragedy. “You can tell it was a lady. She had on shoes and a dress.”
The section of the bar where Mayer jumped was cordoned off by police as they investigated.
“There was a big corporate party up there and she kind of ran through them [the partygoers] and jumped,” said another witness Becky Whittemore.
“They closed off the section where she jumped from. I think a lot of the people up there had zero clue what was going on.”
Officials recovered two bags that might have belonged to the victim, a purse and a backpack.
UPDATE!
The woman who jumped to her death from a rooftop bar in the Flatiron District Monday night was a former Hasidic Jew who carved a new path in the secular world as an app developer – but apparently harbored deep-rooted unhappiness.
Faigy Mayer, 30, who leapt 20 stories from the 230 Fifth Rooftop Bar during a corporate party Monday night, described herself on Twitter as a “Former #hasid who codes in #iOS.”
Mayer was the founder and CEO of Appton, a New York-based mobile and web solutions startup, according to her LinkedIn page.
She wrote on Twitter that she loved coding, bacon, the Apple Watch – and life.
On June 30, she posted a photo on Facebook of a mural at the High Line.
“Yes, life is beautiful!” she wrote with a paint roller in her hand standing in front of the pink letters.
A friend commented on the photo early Tuesday morning, writing: “Wish you believed it, girl. *hugs*”
The tragic techie also was an avid foodie, with her last photo on Instagram showing a close-up view of her bibimbap – a signature Korean dish – from Bonchon on 38th Street.
She also has uploaded pictures of matzoh ball soup from Katz’s Deli, a thai dish from Kiin Thai Eatery and a breakfast sandwich from BEC.
But her lively public pronouncements belied serious problems in her life.
“The word is out that she was an unhappy person who had left the community. She has a history of emotional problems and was seeing a psychiatrist,” a Hasidic source told The Post.
On June 21, she posted about needing some help moving out of her Brooklyn pad.
“Paid job: looking for someone to help me move on Sunday, June 28, from Greenpoint to a 20 min drive away. Have 12 boxes to move. Need you to drive a car,” she wrote.
Ari Mandel, who posted his recollections of Mayer on Facebook, told The Post that she had been “fairly open” about suffering from depression.
“She was in and out of mental institutions every so often. In between, she was a really lovely person,” he said. “She was working on an app. The app was meant for ex-Hasidim. We had talked about working on it and then I got busy so we never went through it.”
He said her death doesn’t come as a complete shock.
“But it’s not any sadder and it doesn’t suck any less,” he said, noting that she had struggled with family issues after her strict upbringing in Williamsburg.
He also said she may have been upset because of trouble finding a new apartment.
“I know that her lease had run out and I know she was struggling to find housing very recently and that may have something to do with it. But who knows? I don’t know what made her do it. Maybe she felt like there was no way out,” he said.
The young woman appeared in a 2009 National Geographic documentary called “Inside Hasidism,” in which she described her decision to leave her insular ultra-Orthodox Belz communities of Williamsburg and Boro Park in Brooklyn.
“It was actually at the age of three that I already showed no interest in Yiddish or Hebrew,” she said on the show. “It was just like so challenging, like the whole transition.”
Mayer hooked up with Footsteps, a NewYork-based organization that helps Ultra-Orthodox men and women in their challenging journeys into secular society.
Mayer graduated summa cum laude from Touro College with a bachelor’s in accounting and earned a master’s in accounting from Brooklyn College. She also earned a certificate in Data Science Specialization from Johns Hopkins University this year.
Among the apps she said she developed were NYCTips, a Big Apple restaurant tip calculator, a parking app called Carma and All About Hasids.
In a recent Facebook posting, Mayer made a telling observation on Ultra-Orthodox wedding customs.
“Hahaha my people are hilarious, putting the bride on a leash while covering her as if she’s the devil. #onlydogsneedleashes,” she wrote July 5 in a post with a video about a “mitzvah tantz,” or custom dance.
The clip shows a man dancing in front of a bride as he holds onto one end of a sash as the other end is attached to the woman, whose face is covered by a veil.
A Hasidic volunteer who helped clean up the scene of the tragedy Monday night said his group found out Mayer was Jewish because a friend who had been with her contacted the Hasidic community.
“It was very tough. It’s never easy to do these things. It’s hard on the volunteers. We do it to maintain religious rites and decorum. But it’s very hard, especially when you know that it’s somebody very young,” the volunteer told The Post about the cleanup task.
“It’s an important mission that is very difficult to accomplish because of the background behind it. When you’re going to help somebody who is 90 years old who passed away versus somebody who is so young and had her whole life ahead of her it just makes the job 10 times harder,” he said.
Mayer jumped from the 230 Fifth Rooftop Bar during a corporate party at 7:30 p.m. after running toward a row of bushes that lined the edge of the establishment, cops and onlookers said.
She landed on the sidewalk on West 27th Street, shocking pedestrians.
It was not immediately known if Mayer was connected to the party.
After the tragedy, some bar patrons still enjoyed table service at the bar, where bottles can fetch as much as $300 each.
