In Defense of the Sidewalk Shed

Find this story in your account’s ‘Saved for Later’ section. Comment A useful protection from rain has gotten vilified. Video: Getty Most days, I pass through a cool, shaded colonnade my son describes as “the tunnel.” A promise to swing by can sometimes convince him to leave the playground, and I plan my own routes around its dependable roof, avoiding the heat and rain that seem to get more extreme as the city turns tropical. There’s a string of lights underneath, like the ones over pleasant outdoor markets, which makes it easier to rifle through my purse for my keys or phone in the evenings. This isn’t some new promenade in a fancy urban park; it’s a sidewalk shed outside a building near my apartment that’s been up since at least 2021. I love a shed. Sure, they can block views or bring unwanted darkness to once-bright apartments. And they have costs for businesses, with all that forest-green plywood making them harder to spot. While it can sometimes seem that the whole city is against them — unsightly, ungovernable, endless — they, for the most part, serve a purpose. And indeed, they find new purpose as the city changes around them. The 1979 death of a Barnard freshman after a chunk of terra-cotta fell off a university building led to legislation mandating inspections, with sheds going up when a building fails. Those rules tightened over the years, and now buildings over six stories have to pass muster every five years, leaving us with about 8,000 sheds that cover 362 miles of city sidewalk. That’s a lot — and highly visible to boot — making the sheds an easy target for politicians looking for a symbol of city dysfunction (which often has nothing to do with the sheds themselves). There’s a whiff of opportunism to some of the recent shed hate we’ve seen among elected officials. When Bill de Blasio’s poll numbers sagged, he started a “shed safety sweep.” As Feds circled, Eric Adams promised to “Get Sheds Down.” And weeks from his election, Zohran Mamdani floated “shed the sheds.” But none of these plans actually addressed the problem: Fixing building façades across the city will take billions upon billions of dollars. Landlords and co-op boards sometimes just don’t have the money, or the repair isn’t a priority, given a broken elevator, a funky boiler, or a flooded basement. (Want to really go after sidewalk sheds? Fund NYCHA.) As for absentee landlords who might have the money but don’t see the point of spending it on this, the city has been increasing fines for delays. But pushing landlords too far will also lead to more aesthetic crimes, like the one committed when 1270 Broadway’s detailed prewar stone façade was covered over with plain, soulless office panels. Meanwhile, some of the arguments against sheds — that they increase crime or drive homelessness — are totally unproven and perhaps based in an ancient Roman association between shade and “shady people,” or umbratici. Reminder: These things really do serve a function. In 2015, a 2-year-old was killed on West End Avenue after terra-cotta fell off a building the Department of Buildings had been warned about. The same material killed an architect on 49th Street as she passed a façade of a building whose owner was sitting on a city order to put up a shed. Then there are the near misses, too many to count. (I myself narrowly avoided a concrete chunk that came loose from a Fidi parking garage on my morning commute.) And I’d say these sheds will likely become more useful in the years to come. As weather gets more extreme, façades that were never built to last into this century are expected to crack up at a faster rate. Modern buildings aren’t that much better, one expert argued on a podcast, given a reliance on curtain walls that don’t always lock into place perfectly, allowing leaks. (Not to mention a contemporary interest in cutting corners.) At 432 Park, which went up in 2015, consultants are now warning about concrete issues that may lead to “concrete hand grenades” falling from as high as 1,400 feet. Meanwhile, experts are predicting two months of 90-plus-degree days by 2050, making a stroll under the shade of my local “tunnel” all the more necessary. In August, I asked Sam Bloch, an urbanist and author of a book called Shade, released earlier this year, to take me on a walk around his neighborhood on the Lower East Side. We stopped outside a NYCHA building with a shed over the entrance. He pulled out a gizmo to measure the local temperature, which found it was a balmy 68 degrees in the shade — ten degrees lower than he measured in the sun a few feet away and “a basically perfect temperature” for human health, Bloch said. This fall, I called Bloch again to go over the new proposals for sidewalk sheds from architecture firms tapped by the city. They were pretty. With transparent roofs and fewer poles, the designs looked like the classy overhangs outside prewar apartments. The New York Times had praised a “long overdue” redesign that made it easier “to see stores” — to me, a plan more interested in commerce than the experiences of the average pedestrian baking on the sidewalk. “I think they all made the shades smaller and brighter,” Bloch said. “We should make them bigger and darker. At least, in my neighborhood, that’s where I see people playing dominos.” I thought of the lovely colonnades of Bologna, the shade of the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the city planners who had designed parks on the East River and under the Kosciuszko Bridge to take advantage of highway overpasses. This is urban utility. Multipurpose spaces, useful for catching your breath in a downpour or doing a pull-up or two. Why can’t we all appreciate a walk through the tunnel? By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us.