Scaffolding Ads Will Ensure Sheds’ Omnipresence

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The New York Sun

If proof were needed for the essential irrationality of our species in general and of our elected officials in particular, you could scarcely find a more flagrant attestation than a proposed law that is now before the City Council. It would allow landlords legally to sell advertising space on their scaffolding sheds. It is a law so acrobatically ill-conceived that is will almost surely pass.

I solicit the help of novelists, epic poets, delusional paranoiacs, and fantasists to invent a reason — any reason — why, once this law passes, the city’s 5,160 scaffolding sheds will ever come down. As things stand now, these sheds have little or no reason to be up in the first place. Those that should exist do not need to be as imposing or as permanent as they are, and their omnipresence in our city — alone in this respect among First, Second, or even Third World metropolises — is a function of the collusive and apathetic incompetence of our magistrates and of feckless landlords who throw up these sheds and then allow projects to languish for years on end.

Now imagine that the City Council invites landlords to make money off of these sheds. Suddenly the sidewalk can be made to pay! Suddenly their fecklessness will have its financial rewards! Is it not inevitable that within, say, eight minutes of passage of this legislation, every landlord in Manhattan and much of Brooklyn will be petitioning City Hall for the right to put up scaffolding? And if a landlord stands to make more than $50,000 a month in a prime location, I assure you that those sheds will never come down, given that, even without advertising, they stay up just about forever.

The proposed law would be strike three in that dreary process by which New York streetscapes have been decimated, the third in a series of ill-considered laws that have been responsible for the demise of the civic quality of the city over the past generation. The first law was passed in 1980, after a Columbia University student was struck and killed by falling debris. Overreacting to her death, this law required that in all work on the exterior of a building more than five stories high, the sidewalk must be covered with a shed to protect pedestrians. Eighteen years later, Local Law 11 was passed, stipulating that all buildings be inspected at least once every five years. In practice, that means that most buildings, at least in Manhattan, have scaffolding once every five years, lasting rarely less than a year.

Amid this raucous chaos of greed, inertia, and foolishness, is there anything to be gained by pointing out that this new law directly contravenes the interest, indeed, the collective majesty, of the citizens of New York? The sidewalks, which belong to us, have been surrendered to the landlords, who will soon have a source of revenue potentially far more profitable than what comes from renting space inside their buildings.

Ironically, one of the few successes regarding scaffolding in New York has been the campaign in recent months by the Department of Buildings to rid these sheds of their illegal advertising, through the imposition of heavy fines. But that success — a rare and modest one — is about to be subverted by this new law.

In response, the legislators argue that, by legalizing and taxing advertising, they can fill the city’s coffers. Several thoughts come to mind. I have never quite understood why New Yorkers — those who even notice and care about the pervasiveness of scaffolding — should be so scandalized by scaffolding sheds that have advertising. The scandal is that these sheds, with rare exceptions, exist at all. I am similarly unsympathetic toward those who oppose advertising on the grounds that it coarsens the cityscape. With or without ads, scaffolding has already devastated the physical reality of New York — its amenity, its comfort, and its appearance — to such a degree that a few ads will make no difference.

This being the case, if there are scaffolding sheds, they should have advertising, on one condition: that all of the revenue goes to the city, and none of it to the landlords. The consequence of this decision would be that at least the city’s revenue would increase — considerably, in fact — and since the city is already ugly on account of its scaffolding sheds, surely it will be no uglier if those sheds are covered with ads.

If the result of this proliferation of ads is that our citizens finally question the reason for having these scaffolds in the first place, then perhaps we will be able to make some progress in undoing a grievous urban problem entirely invented and legislated into existence through the abject incompetence of our City Council.

jgardner@nysun.com


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