Jennifer Rosoff, ex-LIer who fell from Manhattan balcony, mourned in Woodbury

Hundreds of relatives and friends visited a Woodbury funeral home Sunday to mourn a former Long Islander who plunged to her death Thursday after the railing of her 17th-floor Manhattan apartment balcony apparently gave way.

Jennifer Rosoff, an advertising executive who graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Huntington Station, was with a date on the balcony when she either sat or leaned on the railing, police said.

"This was a 35-year-old girl who died senselessly and tragically," said a friend, Ross Wallenstein, 35, a public relations executive who lives in Manhattan, but was raised in Melville. "The only good that can come of this is if something like it never happens to anyone else, if the city takes added precautions."

He and Rosoff had been friends since they were 8 or 9 years old in Hebrew school in Melville, he said. He recalled a kind and loving friend who, like many of their classmates, had left Long Island to pursue a career in New York City -- advertising, in her case.

Dozens of them made the trip back out to Long Island on Sunday for the service at Gutterman's funeral home, Wallenstein said. After a 45-minute service, some mourners left for the cemetery and some remained, talking among themselves.

Wallenstein was still stunned.

"She was 5-foot-9," he said, and slender. "Who . . . thinks their balcony is going to break?"

The gray brick high-rise building where Rosoff lived at 400 E. 57th St. on Manhattan's Upper East Side was built before World War II, The Associated Press said. Only the higher-floor corner apartments have balconies, and the New York City Department of Buildings has ordered that they not be used until further inspections are conducted.

Those who knew and worked with Rosoff described a generous, talented and driven professional who made friends wherever she went.

"She was just unbelievably helpful," Danny Bellish, 26, a sales manager for Saveur, a food magazine, said last week.

Online records show Rosoff lived in Baldwin, Melville, Northport and Huntington Station, where she graduated from Walt Whitman High School in 1996, before getting a bachelor's degree in communications from Tulane University in New Orleans. She worked in sales for several major media organizations.

In April, she started as the sales director at TripleLift, an online advertising firm in Manhattan.

With Sheila Anne Feeney

and Ellen Yan