But recent efforts have reimagined them as experiential installations.” That same year, Citrovia-an immersive installation that featured giant handcrafted lemon trees-went up near Penn Station under a construction shed at the bottom of a site being assembled by Brookfield Properties, whose marketing team said that while sidewalks sheds are usually a “deterrent” to pedestrians, “this was an opportunity to turn that on its head.” As the Times put it in a 2021 article: “Construction sheds are a necessary evil, meant to protect workers and passers-by. Some New York buildings have made efforts to spruce up sidewalk sheds and scaffolds, making their imposition more pleasant for pedestrians. Any fines for delays to facade repairs are probably cheaper than completing tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of fixes. But rather than complete the required repairs and disassemble the scaffold, many building owners or landlords opt to go the cheaper route of waiting until the next city inspection approaches, while they ignore violations. According to reportage by the Times, the city rules that residential buildings taller than six stories must conduct a thorough facade inspection every five years and make any necessary repairs (due to Local Law 11). Plus-some of the sheds seem to stay up forever in New York City. As the Post stated last summer, other large cities like New York don’t have “miles-on-end of sidewalk tunnels” and are not, in fact, “overwhelmed with victims of falling debris.” The DOB maintains an interactive sidewalk shed map displaying actively permitted sheds throughout the city as of press time, there are 9,077, though the number changes every day.ĭespite the deadly danger that scaffolding poses to construction laborers, the general public is, perhaps, largely unaware of this and usually regards scaffolding as an eyesore and sidewalk sheds as a nuisance (plus, for New Yorkers whose apartment buildings are shrouded in scaffolding, an invasion of privacy and a lifestyle disruptor). As the Department of Buildings (DOB) explains, scaffolds and sidewalks sheds “serve very different purposes and are not interchangeable.” Sheds sit on the sidewalk beneath an under-construction or deteriorating building to protect the public from falling debris, like deteriorating masonry or dropped construction material. Most of these incidents occur on non-union sites that sidestep safety measures in order to cut costs and speed up project timelines.īefore the construction of scaffolding-temporary structures made out of wooden planks and metal poles, which are put up outside of buildings so that workers can use them to build, repair, or clean buildings-sidewalk sheds must be erected. Last year alone, five logged construction worker deaths in New York City involved falls from scaffolding. And as Union-Built Matters reported last month, scaffolds are the leading locale of injury and death for construction workers accidents involving them result in about 60 deaths, and more than 4,000 injuries, every year, according to the U.S. Sidewalk sheds and scaffolding structures are a permanent part of city life for New Yorkers.
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