Using Google Street View if you drop yourself into New York City, there is a very high chance that you will come across scaffolding over sidewalks. Also known as sidewalk sheds, these can be seen all over the five boroughs. Scaffolding has always been there across the entirety of New York City, but we don’t really know why and what is the purpose of scaffolding.
Scaffolding in New York City is 400 miles long, which protects pedestrians from falling bricks and provides shelter when it rains. However, scaffolding destroys city landscapes and leads to other safety concerns, especially when walking at night. Some scaffolding covered the buildings over ten years, which also led to the fact that people never actually get a chance to see the entire design of the building.
A misconception surrounding these sidewalk sheds is that they are up because of all the constant new developments in the city. The truth is far from this. To understand why almost every street in New York City looks like this we have to go back to 1979 when Grace Gold, a freshman at Barnard College in Columbia University was killed by a falling piece of masonry.
The city responded to this by passing Local Law 10 in 1980 which was later amended by Local Law 11 in 1980 which required buildings over six stories tall to have their facades inspected every five years.
If they fail inspection, the building owner is required to repair the facade, and in the meantime install a sidewalk shed to protect people from falling debris. The problem is, the law isn’t working as intended.
Buildings fail inspection all the time and that is primarily because New York is chock full of buildings whose exterior masonry was done decades if not centuries ago. Repairing the facades of these buildings is very expensive. But here is what isn’t expensive, indefinitely leaving a sidewalk shed up.
For most building owners it is cheaper to just leave the shed up, pay the occasional fine, and hope residents don't mind paying $3,000 a month to live in a building they’ve never seen. So that's exactly what they do. That's why a building like 409 Edgecombe Avenue in Harlem has had its sidewalk shed up for over 15 years.
Shaping the Contemporary City @ Pratt Institute
