I took a little trip through New York via Google street view. And one thing in noticed where a large amount of gantrys above the sidewalks. In almost every street I could find at least one. They seem to be build out of temporary construction scaffolding but no signs of construction work. And they always are only one floor high, often with a (green or grey) balustrade on top. I think it looks rather ugly, blocking the sight on the sometimes nice fronts of the buildings behind them.
Edit: thanks for the explanation. Seems like the New Yorkers need to invest in some more quality fassades. Remembers me of a building of my local university. Pieces of the building have fallen off. Thus the building was completely covered with a net for many years.
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A lot of buildings in NYC are very old and the state requires that they’re inspected and maintain so that they don’t pose a safety risk, since pieces of the facade may often fall off and hit someone on the sidewalk. Since the owners don’t want to spend the money to inspect and repair the building, which can be quite a lot, they can instead put that scaffolding over the sidewalk which would protect pedestrians in the event a piece of the facade fell off, so they’re not held liable in case of injury. There is no time limit for this and it’s actually much cheaper for the owners to do that than actually repair the buildings.
[(47) The Scaffie Hierarchy: How To With John Wilson – YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ_o_9MaJ24)
Let’s go to Klay Thompson for his opinion on New York scaffolds: https://youtu.be/aZyGcGV72ac
They are called sidewalk sheds and they are there to protect people from falling debris. They are meant to be temporary, but it’s often cheaper to have a temporary shed be permanent than fix an aging facade. NYC has facade inspections and if you fail you need to put one up until it is fixed. It’s also required for construction, and there’s a lot of that too.
There has been some (slow) movement to improve this over the last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/24/nyregion/nyc-scaffolding.html
Was that university UIC perhaps?
here is a good video by Half as Interesting about this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lphKvTqovHs&t=102s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lphKvTqovHs&t=102s)
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