Photo taken on Oct. 29, 2012 shows cars in the 33rd Street in Manhattan as Hurricane Sandy made its approach in New York, the United States. [Xinhua]

A long string of storm-related incidents began hammering New York on Monday morning and escalated as the wind speed increased throughout the day and the tide rose in the evening.

Several buildings partially collapsed, including the face of a building in the Chelsea section of Manhattan's West Side. There were no injuries.

In addition, the boom of a huge crane was blown back atop its control cab and counterweight at a 90-story luxury residential building under construction on West 57th Street in midtown Manhattan. The boom was left dangling from its precarious perch at a height of 304 meters.

Fire officials ordered buildings in a two-block radius evacuated and gas and steam mains closed down. That came out of concerns that if the hanging boom broke loose it could pierce nearby buildings or the pavement, rupturing gas and steam lines, and sparking explosions.

Late Monday, New York University's Langone Medical Center on Midtown's East Side began evacuating about 200 patients after losing electricity. The evacuees included neo-natal infants, some cradled in the arms of nurses, their intravenous drips attached. The infants had to be carried downstairs because no elevators were working.

Dr. Robert Grossman, dean of the hospital, told CBS's Channel 2 that backup generators failed in the blackout, which stretched from a few blocks north of the hospital all the way to Battery Park near the southern tip of Manhattan.

He said patients were being transferred to Mt. Sinai and Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospitals uptown. Scores of ambulances lined the First Avenue in front of the hospital waiting to ferry the patients to the other hospitals.

"There's a spectrum of illnesses," he said of the "mostly critical-care" patients' ailments. "Some of them are very sick."