Some didn’t see a difference in foot traffic or declined to comment because the manager wasn’t around.
In interviews on scaffold-shaded streets all over the city, City Limits found that not all merchants were disapproving of scaffolding. Up for months or years, business owners want the shedding outside their bars, bodegas, and jewelry stores removed at a much faster rate than is currently the norm in many neighborhoods, and are backing a controversial proposal that is making its way through the City Council amid stiff resistance from powerful industry groups.Ī barrier to business with no end in sightĪ new, interactive Department of Buildings (DOB) map reveals a metropolis threaded with “sidewalk bridges” as they are also called, especially Manhattan. The owners say the wooden barriers drive customers away in droves and turn their storefronts into makeshift homeless shelters.
SIDEWALK SHED AND SCAFFOLDING INSTALL
The same law also requires the owner of a building to install sidewalk sheds to protect pedestrians.īut nearly 40 years on, with more than 14,000 buildings participating in the program, not everyone is happy with the proliferation of hunter-green sidewalk sheds the law has helped generate. In response to the tragedy, the following year the New York City Council passed Local Law 10, requiring owners to do façade inspections periodically on buildings over six stories, later amended to Local Law 11 in 1998 to include all facades, and now called the Facade Inspection Support Program.
As a detective told a Times reporter, the slab “bounced off the sill and dropped to the sidewalk,” striking Grace Gold in the forehead, killing her.
SIDEWALK SHED AND SCAFFOLDING FREE
“I understand that she and a bunch of friends were walking to the Citi cash machine further south and didn’t quite make it.”Īlong the crowded sidewalk on 115th street and Broadway the group of friends were moving when a one-foot slab of ornamental terra cotta broke free from the lintel of a 1912 apartment house, seven stories above. “This was the big day,” Lori recalls fondly. Lori still has a photograph of Grace smiling in her summer dress as she poses with two graduating friends in their gowns before heading post-ceremony with others to celebrate. That May 16th was a warm one, with temperatures reaching 77 degrees. When Gold herself got home, she found a police officer, a rabbi-and her uncle who revealed the “great shock” to her. He could do the math.” Her cousins said they had never seen him cry before. “When the radio said a 17-year-old had been hit, he popped a nitroglycerine tablet. “He thought ‘One in 2,000.’ Then when the radio said a Barnard student, my father thought, ‘One in 500,'” she says. He later told Gold that, as he listened, he had contemplated the odds that his younger daughter was the student. Her late father was on his way home from Long Island when he heard on the car radio of a student killed by falling masonry early that evening. when, on a Wednesday night, she got an urgent call from her uncle in the city, insisting she return home immediately. Lori had graduated from Columbia University the year before and was working in Washington D.C.
0 kommentar(er)
