The Man in the Window: NYC's 5-Year Facade Checks

So we’re in a pre-war apartment building on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. It’s a beautiful view out the window. From here, on the 10th floor, we can see all the way to the buildings across the park. Over the park, hawks swoop around, tourists climb the steps of the Met, children frolic in a playground alongside the Met, runners silently skip by, and lovers spread blankets out on the lawns and have picnics. It’s a splendid view.

And then, I talk briefly with the workman just outside our window. Anyone who has a pre-war place in the city is familiar with this. Forty years ago, during the Koch administration, a woman was hit on the head and killed by a brick that came loose from the façade of a building far up.

And so it began. From that day to this, scaffolding clutters up nearly one quarter of all the sidewalks in the city of New York so that workmen can check the facades of all the buildings to make sure this does not happen again. The law says buildings must be checked every five years.

Companies are hired to do this. People who own the companies get rich. Absolutely always the spot check finds things that need to be removed and replaced. This takes years.

And so now, what is surely the most beautiful city in the world can only really be seen by those city sightseeing buses that roam around Manhattan. Up top, you are 20 feet up. And that is enough to see the city without the obstruction of all the scaffolding. Isn’t it beautiful?

I don’t know of any other city in this country or anywhere else in the world that is overwhelmed with temporary scaffolding everywhere over the sidewalks like this. Efforts have been made since the Koch administration to do away with this law. Or at least require that buildings be checked every 20 years instead of every five. That might be reasonable.

It’s ridiculous that buildings have to be checked every five years. Wouldn’t it be correct to say that repairs lasting only five years on the façade of a building are the fault of the repair people? Wouldn’t checking every 10 or 20 years be more sensible? How about never?

These rich construction people have a stranglehold on those responsible for changing these laws. It’s called lobbying. I don’t know what else to call it. Furthermore, I’m told that although it’s true that pedestrians now are not hit by falling bricks anymore, on several occasions, pedestrians have been killed by the scaffolding.

The building we are in was checked five years ago. The scaffolding was up for two years. Then this year, it’s back up again. And this time, we’re told, it will stay up for three years. And so we get to know the workmen. Actually, we don’t get to know the workmen. They get to know us.

Every once in a while, a platform is slowly hauled up by ropes along the outside the façade of our building and if it’s to take a workman farther up he gets to see us in our apartment, either clothed or unclothed, as he slowly rises up outside. It’s quite an occasion.

We, inside, feel violated. We are eating breakfast or getting dressed or exercising on a machine, doing what we are doing and up glides this battered and filthy platform with broken handrails, netting, pots of glue and caulking guns, and a man – we’ve never seen a woman – wearing a leather toolbelt, sweatshirts, helmets, gloves and dungarees. They are nice folks from what one would call third-world countries.

Two days ago, the workman gliding by wore a sweatshirt that said LSU, National Champions, 2019. Yesterday, there was another workman with a sweatshirt that said Alabama Tigers on it. They seem nice enough.

Sometimes they wave politely, but mostly they just look the other way as they go by, apparently aware of how much this is none of their affair. And sometimes, as for instance, today, they stop just outside our window to do some caulking or brick removal really front row and center in our lives.

Sometimes, when we remember, we leave the curtains, which we had closed when we went to bed the night before, closed so we can get a little privacy when we do our morning ablutions. But sometimes we don’t. It’s kind of hit or miss.

In particular today, we gestured to the workman about a window in our bathroom that overlooks the park that for three years since this was done before, had sticky clear plastic put up, but then never removed. Sticky clear plastic had been put up on the outside of all our windows back then so, apparently, whatever they were going to do would not injure the windows. And when they were done back then, they took all the plastic back down. Except they forgot to take it down from that particular window.

The gesturing worked. He went over and started removing the old plastic, but then he stopped. Thought better of it. And he left it half done.

Why? I suspect he wanted to talk to a higher up further down before he did this to get further permission. Well, we’ll see him back up here tomorrow, no doubt.

Wouldn’t it be great if our current mayor had the guts to have this law changed? Bloomberg couldn’t do it. Neither could de Blasio or Dinkins or Giuliani.

What say you Mayor Adams?