If you’ve always known something, it can be difficult to see how weird it is. New Yorkers walk through construction sites all the time, intentionally so on the part of the builders and with the blessing of the Department of Buildings. It looks something like this:
Like so many of our local peculiarities, it can be traced back to the difficulty of construction logistics when buildings fill most of the their lots. If you have a new building that extends to the street lot lines (as, for example, in the picture, where the new building runs out flush to the lot line on Fifth Avenue to the left and the side street (West 44th Street) straight ahead), how do you both allow people to walk by the site and have a connection between the site and the street for deliveries, for an external temporary elevator, for delivery cranes? Closing the sidewalk completely is a last resort and one that the city government greatly discourages, given the volume of foot traffic in most of Manhattan.
The answer in the early stages of construction is often to take a driving lane out of public use and, after it’s protected by barricades, have people walk there. That’s fine for the site logistics, but messes up traffic. Once the building is far enough along that it’s out of the ground and there are structural floors between its at-grade level and where work is going on, that pedestrian path can be bent inward, running through the future lobby or retail spaces of the ground floor. The concrete slab I was standing on when I took that picture is not the sidewalk, it’s the ground floor of the new building. Plywood protection on both sides isolates people from the construction (to the right) and the logistics uses of the real sidewalk (to the left). The last stage, once the exterior of the new building is complete and the cranes and other exterior access are gone, is to push people back out to the sidewalk as work takes place on the interior only.
It’s a little confusing because the sign about authorized personnel relates to the door into the site that’s out of frame to the right. Signs like that, and the feeling that you’ve walked somewhere private confuse some people, who think they’ve stepped into a construction site without knowing how they did so, when in reality they’re on the safe pedestrian path running through the unfinished building.
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