There are now nearly 9,000 sheds entombing city streets, according to the Department of Buildings, up from about 3,500 in 2003. They devour precious sidewalk space, cut off sunlight, create safety hazards and hurt businesses.
Across the city, sidewalk sheds and scaffolding spread like kudzu. Plenty of New Yorkers can understand his frustration. "Do you think this would be allowed to happen if we lived on the corner of Park Avenue and 72nd Street?" "This is a beautiful block, and people here care about our streets," Delly said. He contacted The New York Times, which wrote a feature on it two years ago. Repairs at the building it surrounds move at a glacial pace.ĭelly has complained over and over to the city, elected officials and building inspectors, who have fined the owner for numerous violations. But the chief purpose of this particular shed, on a handsome block in the Mount Morris Park Historic District, seems to be to collect garbage and provide shelter to the loiterers who lurk underneath. Sidewalk sheds and the scaffolding that usually sits atop them are intended to protect pedestrians from falling bricks and debris. "It's completely demoralizing," said Laurent Delly, a real estate broker with a master's degree in civil engineering who lives down the street from the shed.
One day in 2004, workmen arrived at the corner of West 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem to erect a sidewalk shed, one of those unsightly steel-and-wooden structures that pop up any time a building is under construction.
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