Here Comes the Sun! Time to Embrace the Sidewalks as Pols Plan to “Shed the Shed”

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New York’s ubiquitous scaffolding structures — officially known as sidewalk sheds — cast a giant shadow over the city’s streets, where some sheds have been obscuring businesses (and photo opportunities) for decades.

A short walk on 9th Avenue displays a patchwork quilt of sheds, where large-scale structures like the one obscuring the Film Center Building at 630 9th Avenue (which went up a year ago this week) are quickly approaching their permit expirations. In an effort to speed up removal, Borough President Mark Levine has announced an initiative to expedite repairs and enforce long-expired sheds. Will the program bring much-needed sunlight back to Hell’s Kitchen’s sidewalks and long-suffering storefronts? 

Borough President Levine presented his office’s new initiative, “Shed the Shed” on Monday, highlighting the urgency in reducing the city’s thousands of long-lingering sheds. “It’s a good idea that’s totally run amok,” said Levine. “There are over 4,000 sheds in Manhattan alone — if you line them up, it would go from here to Montreal.”

He added, “On average, they’re out there for eight months each, but over 200 have been there for five years, and this is a blight on neighborhoods. The bottom line is the work to fix the façades has to be done more quickly. Our plan calls for carrots and sticks to speed that up by helping buildings that need some financial assistance by adding fines to those who are not doing the right thing.” 

The plan tackles shed removal through a five-point strategy:

• Providing low-interest loans to buildings so that they can expedite and complete repairs, as well as creating an accelerator program to guide property owners and co-op boards toward best repair, financing, engineering and compliance practices 
• Reduce delays in permitting requirements by working with the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Department of Buildings to smooth out the procedure
• Enforce penalties against non-compliant buildings by hiring a task force to identify them, increase fines against those who don’t complete work in a timely manner, hire emergency city workers to complete work on unsafe buildings and create rent abatement programs for tenants suffering beneath longstanding sidewalk sheds 
• Utilize drones to inspect façade work, and reform sidewalk shed design regulations to include more customized options to community needs, as well as enhanced lighting 
• Increase inspection and completion cycles from five to seven years to encourage full completion of façade work within one cycle 

BP Levine said: “Everything we’re calling for is to prioritize safety for both pedestrians and workers. We’re not talking about removing scaffolding if a building still has dangerous conditions on the façade. We’re talking about fixing the façade more quickly just so New Yorkers understand what’s usually happening.”

He added: “If you see scaffolding out there for years on end, it’s that the building doesn’t want to, or is unable to pay for repairs to the façade, and it’s just cheaper and easier for them to leave the scaffolding up. We want those repairs made quickly. That’s a win for safety, but it also gets the scaffolding down — which is what we’re trying to achieve in this report.” 

Back in Hell’s Kitchen, myriad buildings would be affected by an expedited sidewalk shed removal process — from the neighborhood’s newest smoke shops to long-standing landmarks like the residential Ritz Plaza, where a shed has been up for 839 days. Last March after the Film Center was outfitted with a prominent Urban Umbrella, W42ST surveyed readers to guess how long they believed the shed would remain in place. The results were reflective of many New Yorkers’ skeptical feelings toward the speed of city construction. “2034,” said Max Von Essen at the time, while Christy Miller added, “I’ll say the 12th of Neveruary”.  Reader John Sorrentino remarked: “Oh, I’d venture to guess it’ll come down soon. Like 2029.”

While the $8 billion sidewalk shed industry may seem like a New York fixture since the city was known as New Amsterdam, the structures are a semi-recent phenomenon. The death of a Barnard College Student on May 16, 1979 — killed by a piece of falling terra cotta from the 8th floor of a building on W115th St — led then-mayor Ed Koch to implement the first iteration of the city’s Façade Inspection & Safety Program (FISP), known as Local Law 10. After several incidents in 1997 — where debris fell from both Midtown’s American Airlines Theatre (then known as the Selwyn Theatre) and the Church of Scientology Building on W46th Street — the regulations were updated to include additional balcony and railing and inspections and the law was revised to its current form, Local Law 11. 

While Local Law 11 requires sidewalk sheds to remain in place for pedestrian safety as buildings conduct façade repairs and general construction, in recent years some building owners have opted to delay or abandon repairs in favor of leaving up the cheaper to maintain sidewalk sheds, leaving helpless business owners to languish under large-scale structures that obscure their signage and create safety issues for pedestrians passing through at night. 

According to the city’s active permit tracker, there are currently 9,055 active sidewalk shed permits across the five boroughs — down from 2020’s peak of 11,370 permits, a DOB spokesperson told W42ST. Though there are only eight fewer permits in March 2023 than in March 2022, it’s worth noting that new sidewalk sheds are constructed daily. 

To meaningfully reduce the city’s sheds long-term, City Council Member Keith Powers — who appeared with Borough President Levine on NY1 to promote “Shed the Shed” — argued that buy-in from city agencies like the DOB and LPC is a must. “We’re going to go and introduce legislation to make sure that the laws change in the way that we’re talking about in this report, but the critical thing is we get our city agencies to start enforcing it, to start resourcing themselves in that particular way, and to start tackling bureaucracies that exist,” he said. “The Landmarks Preservation Commission has jurisdiction over some buildings. The Department of Buildings has jurisdiction over all those buildings. We need them to start working together, and what they really need is a political push.” 

A spokesperson for the DOB said: “As Mayor Adams said in his State of the City address in January, this administration is laser-focused on reclaiming valuable public space for New Yorkers, strengthening oversight of longstanding sidewalk sheds, and improving shed design requirements to keep our city’s streetscapes vibrant. We appreciate the borough president’s recommendations and look forward to reviewing his specific proposals.”

The DOB added that since late 2019, it has doubled the size of its façade inspection unit to assist with the enforcement of safety regulations, created a Long-Standing Shed inspection program to regularly check sheds that have existed for more than five years and updated rules to strengthen noncompliance penalties and work through sidewalk shed oversights. 

The agency has also closely tracked over 40 buildings across the city to bring criminal and civil nuisance abatement cases against the longest standing sheds. To date, nearly a dozen of the 40  long-standing sheds had been removed after the owners were successfully compelled to remediate the unsafe conditions at their buildings — including two buildings in Hell’s Kitchen, at 748 10th Avenue, where a 2003 shed was removed in 2020, and at 335 W39th Street, where a 2009 shed W42ST identified last March was removed in 2022. 

But there’s additional light at the end of the tunnel. After four-and-a-half years of a nearly block-long sidewalk shed at W44th Street between 8th and 9th Avenue — the site of the Record Plant, once frequented by the likes of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and now known as the home of Birdland Jazz Club and restaurant Peachy Keen  — the structure has been cleared, freeing the popular businesses to see the West Side sunshine and additional customers. And Hell’s Kitchen residents should keep a watchful eye on the Film Center…the shed’s permit expires next Tuesday.