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Why New York City Can’t Fix Its Ugly Scaffolding Problem

Thanks to archaic laws, the Big Apple is filled with sidewalk sheds that stay for years

Scaffolding covers the sidewalks near buildings at the intersection of West End Avenue and West 88th Street in Manhattan.

By Erin AilworthFollow | Photographs and video by Jonah Markowitz for The Wall Street Journal

Feb. 18, 2024 5:30 am ET

NEW YORK—Anne “LaVerne” Gaither teared up when workers dismantled the hunter-green plywood and metal scaffolding that for 21 years obscured the entrance of her Harlem apartment building.

The 220-foot-long structure, known here as a sidewalk shed, was New York City’s oldest existing shed until it came down in December. It was originally built in 2002 to protect pedestrians during required repairs to the neo-Georgian facade of 409 Edgecombe Ave., a century-old landmark once home to luminaries such as W.E.B. DuBois and Thurgood Marshall. 

Gaither, 93 years old, used to keep bottles of water for the workers on the wooden platform outside her second-story window. “My tears were thanks for being alive to see it come down,” she said.

A few weeks later, damage caused by a deadly fire forced the rise of a new shed.

The building’s shed saga is an extreme example of the staying power of New York City’s scaffolding, whose ubiquity spurred some to joke that it is the Big Apple’s official tree. More than 8,300 sidewalk sheds currently enshroud some 360 miles of the city’s sidewalks, according to permit data from the New York City Department of Buildings. (Those numbers encompass active permits without taking into account whether a property owner changed vendors or briefly removed, and then replaced, scaffolding under a new permit.) Around 300 of those sheds are more than five years old.

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