Charles Boyce expected it would take him two years to erect a shelter at New York’s City Hall where food delivery workers could rest, escape the weather and recharge their e-bikes.
Instead, he had a window of three hours to get the basic structure up. And it was not going well.
Mr. Boyce, whose company, Boyce Technologies, engineered and built the shelter, stood outside City Hall at 6:15 p.m. last Wednesday and tapped the toe of his loafer against a nub of metal sticking out of the sidewalk. There, by his foot, was the cable meant to bring electricity to the structure.
It was in the wrong place, however, set in the concrete eight inches from where Mr. Boyce needed it. This was a problem, because it did not align with the electrical panel that Mr. Boyce and his team had hoped to install inside the shelter.
They needed a solution quickly. In three hours a crew from the city’s Transportation Department would arrive to install concrete barriers to protect the shelter from cars traveling on Broadway, and the barriers would block access to the construction site.
“When we installed the power eight weeks ago, we didn’t have a design for the building yet,” Mr. Boyce said. The shelter was scheduled to be unveiled in less than a week, on Tuesday morning. “Now we don’t have any time to change anything. We just have to hope it all fits together.”
About 80,000 delivery workers ply the city’s streets on mopeds and electric bikes, delivering food through blizzards, thunderstorms and heat waves. The notion of creating shelters for them is not exactly new. Gustavo Ajche was a delivery worker in 2021 when he noticed his fellow workers gathering under construction scaffolds when it rained.
Even then, the workers were exposed to the elements, Mr. Ajche said, without restrooms or a place to charge batteries.
“I saw a lot of workers were suffering,” said Mr. Ajche, 42, who is still a delivery worker and an organizer with the nonprofit group Deliveristas Unidos.
In 2022, Senator Chuck Schumer and Mayor Eric Adams announced they had secured $1 million in federal funding to build a rest stop in New York for delivery workers. From there, the project proceeded with customary government slowness, Mr. Ajche said. The hub’s location, on the site of a former newsstand near City Hall, was chosen because it was owned by the city, had electricity and an existing but dilapidated structure, and was in a neighborhood with high demand for delivered food, said J. Manuel Mansylla, director of Fantástica, the company that designed the shelter.
As with any new construction, there were opinions. The Historic Districts Council held that the old newsstand, which mimicked a classic subway entrance, should be repurposed instead of replaced. The hub’s modernist design was “inappropriate” and too big, the council said.
Some found the location outside City Hall problematic.
“Having a bike and scooter pileup there is going to cause chaos,” said Joann Ariola, who represents a section of southeast Queens on the City Council.
Even the deliveristas were disappointed that the new building would not include bathrooms. (There was no water hookup nearby, according to the Parks Department, which owns the site.)
By the time Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as mayor on Jan. 1, the deliverista hub proposal had bounced around city government for more than three years. It still had no Fire Department sign-off or building permits. Its design wasn’t even finalized.
This January, the project changed radically. Mr. Mamdani and his top aides decided they wanted the hub completed during the mayor’s first 100 days in office, which meant a deadline of April 12, said Jeremy Edwards, a spokesman for the mayor. Then the timeline shortened again, because leaders including Mr. Schumer hoped to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony on April 7.
The timing has symbolic importance, said Mitchell Moss, an urban planning professor at New York University.
“If Mamdani can get this done in record time, he’s conveying that they can get things done, and quickly,” Mr. Moss said.
A process that normally takes two years would need to happen in two months, Mr. Boyce said.
“If the mayor wants it, we will do it,” Mr. Boyce said in the hours when it was uncertain that the builders would make the deadline. “The bikers can miss a day or two. But the mayor can’t miss his hundredth day.”
Engineers at Boyce Technologies, located in an industrial zone in Long Island City, Queens, worked overtime to engineer and build parts for the structure simultaneously, plus figure out how to assemble it at top speed on a narrow patch of sidewalk smaller than two parking spaces. The schedule left no time to apply for a permit to bring a crane to City Hall. So Hugo Arias, a welder at Boyce, spent the evening before installation fabricating a cranelike piece of bent steel.
Fitted with a cable and winch, and jammed into the business end of a forklift, the MacGyvered contraption could hoist the roof sections, no permit required.
“The paint isn’t even dry yet,” Mr. Boyce said, boasting of the improvised crane arm.
The night of installation, his workers drilled into the sidewalk to replace the bent conduit. Brandon Ye, the project’s lead engineer, somehow rejiggered the entire electrical system so that its connection now landed eight inches north.
“Now I just have to do some math,” said Mr. Ye, 29.
The Transportation Department workers arrived at 9:15 p.m., right on time. Mr. Boyce and his crew were ready, having fitted the roof and rear wall panel 30 minutes before. By Monday, the structure was nearly complete.
“This is all like synchronized swimming,” Mr. Mansylla said. “To build a structure in New York City in, what, 48 hours? That’s as fast as it gets.”
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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