As reported by Curbed, the New York Department of Buildings now has an online interactive map showing the location of sidewalk sheds. The headline statistic is that there are some 280 miles of shed in place at this time, but that’s a bit misleading. It’s a big city, with over 6000 miles of street, so we’re talking about 5% scaffold coverage, but that’s misleading in the other direction. The scaffold is not randomly scattered around the city, but rather concentrated in areas with multiple-story buildings and no side yards, and there are only 500 or so miles of street in Manhattan.
The sheds are, of course, put in place for public safety. They may be annoying, but having casualty lists from their absence would be worse; anyone who’s ever been on top of a shed has seen debris and construction materials that have collected there as they have fallen off the building. There have been efforts to come up with shed designs that are more attractive, but they’ve all stumbled over the issues of price and ease of construction.
Sheds are not going away any time soon, but hopefully tracking them will limit their long-term presence to buildings that really have safety problems.
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