One of New York’s longest-standing city-owned scaffolding sheds has finally come down after more than 10 years — sort of.
The shed at 2720 Broadway on the Upper West Side — first erected in 2012 — was removed on June 18, months after The Post revealed it to be one of about 500 sheds on city-owned buildings across the Big Apple.
But the shed was only partially removed — around the building’s corner on W. 104th St. the scaffolding is still standing, complete with a fenced off area filled with porta-potties and construction equipment blocking half the street.
To make matters worse, just days after the Broadway shed came down, a huge new shed went up on a neighboring building.
That means the den of seediness that’s plagued the block for over a decade — including zonked-out people staggering and sleeping on storefronts, panhandling, and a make-shift street market of junk-sellers — has only moved a couple of dozen feet over.
It has left business owners and residents fuming.
“When this disappears, I am so happy, I said, ‘Finally, now it is more clean. It might come back, the neighborhood from how it was before,” Fernando Andrade, a cobbler whose shop is mired in the new scaffolding, told The Post.
‘”But immediately they put it back up,” he sighed.
“I am scared for that because we don’t know how long this might be. I hope very not too long, no. I hope.”
Local bodega worker Ali Abdul is also concerned.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
“Now they sleep under here. Nighttime, people sleep, two or three homeless.”
The sheds are just a block away from West End Ave., which The Post previously exposed as one of the worst stretches in the entire city for scaffolding after a thirty-five block stretch was found last year to have just two buildings without the ugly maintenance structures.
Residents lamented the endless game of “whack-a-mole,” where new sheds go up almost on pace with sheds coming down.
Some locals said that the Broadway sheds are the perfect example of that.
“We were elated, thinking, ‘Oh, good!’ And within a matter of weeks it was put back up again. It’s been dreadful,” said 73-year-old neighbor Linda Wright.
“It’s created all kinds of problems in terms of maintaining the cleanliness of the area. It’s become basically a shelter for the homeless and so on. So it’s been a real nuisance,” she added. “It stinks. It’s unconscionable. I don’t know what more I could say.”
The remaining city-owned scaffolding on Broadway is expected to come down in August, the Department of Design and Construction told The Post, explaining the façade work on the building’s south face, where the shed still stands, was delayed after shipments of stone required for its “historically accurate” restoration were late by several months.
“Therefore, we kept the shed up on the south side of the building to complete that portion of the project. We expect it to come down in August,” the city added.
But some Upper West Siders feel that doesn’t explain why the shed was up for nearly 15 years to begin with.
“We’ve been waiting, we moved in here ten years ago, and we’ve been waiting,” said 68-year-old Michael Dulin, whose second-floor business, BeFitNYC, was blocked from sidewalk view by the city’s shed.
“We were told the scaffolding was going to come down in a couple of weeks. It’s been here for ten years,” he said, calling the situation “ridiculous.”
“It’s a blight on the city, and I think it makes the city look terrible,” he added. “I’ve been to Rome and Paris, and they’re a little bit older than New York and I don’t see scaffolding everywhere there, so I think it’s kind of gotten out of control.”
Scaffolding covers about 400 miles of city sidewalks — consisting of more than 8,600 sheds.
That is enough to stretch from New York to Cleveland — and Mayor Eric Adams has been pledging to fix the scourge with his “Get Sheds Down” program since 2023.
in April he signed several bills into law targeting sheds, including one that limits scaffolding permit lifespans from a year to three months, one that increases fines for longstanding sheds, and another that extends mandatory façade inspection times from a blanket five year cycle to between six and 12 years depending on the building’s age.
But some think the city — which has roughly 5% of all of New York’s scaffolding on its own buildings — should begin by cleaning its own house.
“He can start with his city-owned buildings,” said Upper West Sider Lisa Zaslow. “Let’s see what happens.”
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