According to records maintained by New York City’s Buildings Department, there are more than 8,500 sidewalk sheds along the city’s streets. These structures—which are meant to shield pedestrians from falling debris while buildings are being constructed or repaired—are supposed to be temporary. However, nearly 1,000 of these sheds have been in place for more than three years. One shed on the Grand Concourse in the Brox, and another in Brooklyn, have stood since 2011, according to records.
At some of those sites, no work is being done. Property owners have placed the sheds there to comply with local laws—not only because it is often less expensive to fix the underlying facades, but because of the laws that are in place that require them.
For Neal Shoemaker, his business in Harlem has been pressed between two sheds, one of which has existed on and off for the past two decades. Shoemaker believes it is one of the oldest in the city.
“It’s been up forever,” Mister Shoemaker said. “There are not many people around who remember when it wasn’t there.”
City officials have rallied against the number of sheds for years, claiming that they not just obscure businesses, but encourage illegal activity. Their desire for change has been constrained, however, by the death of a Bernard College freshman in 1979, who, at just 17, was killed when a chunk of masonry fell from a building on Broadway north of 115th Street. The laws enacted in the aftermath of the tragedy spurred periodic inspections of buildings taller than six stories. Conducting those inspections, however, requires the erection of scaffolding and protections for people on the streets and sidewalks below.
In 2022, Bloomberg estimated that construction scaffolding was a $1 billion business in New York City. As a result, changing the rules involves “navigating a complicated series of stakeholders and issues,” according to Keith Powers, a city councilman from Manhattan. That accounts for the “hesitation for political actors to take this issue on in the past.”
Now, however, council members such as Mister Powers are encouraged by Mayor Eric Adams’ dislike of the sheds and are pressing a package of reforms as a result. Some are aimed at reducing the number and longevity of the sheds. Others would make the sheds less daunting by requiring better lighting and more variety in their appearance, which have remained hunter-green due to building codes since 2013. ArtBridge, a nonprofit in Chelsea, has been commissioning artists to adorn the construction sites with murals and photographs.
Meanwhile, the Department of Buildings is presenting a campaign called Get Sheds Down to target those scaffoldings that have stood in the city the longest. The department has arranged for more than 250 sheds that have remained in place for more than five years to come down, according to Yegal Shamash, the department’s chief structural engineer. These crackdowns are aimed at owners of properties where “no attempt is being made to fix the underlying conditions that necessitated the shed,” according to Jimmy Oddo, the buildings commissioner.
For Mister Shoemaker, who lamented the longstanding sheds in the first place, he claimed, “When those sheds finally come down, it will be a sunshiny day.”
