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By: Serach Nissim
The city has finally shed it’s a long-standing sidewalk shed, after 21 years.
As reported by the NY Post, the eye soar of a construction shed had taken up the sidewalk at the building at 409 Edgecombe Ave for more than two decades. Residents of the landmarked Manhattan building were overjoyed to see the construction shed finally come down on Friday, although they still bothered to disagreed on who was most to blame for the generation-long eyesore.
The 106-year-old residential building, in Harlem’s national historic district of Sugar Hill, had formerly served as a home to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and its early leaders Walter White, Roy Wilkins, W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall. The building was dubbed “one of Harlem’s most fashionable addresses,” by Poet Langston Hughes in 1946. It’s been speculated that Babe Ruth lived there before it became a black enclave, the Brick Underground reported. Famous athletes Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Althea Gibson were frequent visitors to the building, one longtime building tenant told The Post.
Per the Post, the construction shed was first erected in 2002 due to a law which requires regular façade inspections. An engineer had found unsafe conditions, and so the shed went up. To residents’ dismay, however, for the nearly two decades that followed the repairs were not completed and the shed stayed up. Finally in 2019, the city filed criminal charges against the management company, per City Hall. The building is owned equally by 122 apartment owners. Some residents argued that the building’s management board had been fighting to do the repairs for some 15 years, but that the process was bogged down in red tape.
Mayor Eric Adams held a press conference at the site on Friday, boasting the removal of the city’s longest-standing sidewalk shed, saying it was mostly thanks to his ‘Get Sheds Down’ plan. “For 21 years, residents of Harlem sacrificed public space and the beauty of a historical landmark because property managers repeatedly failed to do their job,” said Adams. “Today, we deliver 409 Edgecombe Avenue back into the hands of the Sugar Hill community and remain focused on continuing to safely remove the eyesores that are ugly sidewalk sheds and scaffolding across the five boroughs.”
Resident Odessa Starke, who has lived in the city landmark building since the 80s, told the Post, that the board had long been working and repeatedly raised money to complete work mandated by the city, only to be plagued by issues with city inspectors or unreliable contractors. “We feel wonderful. It was a long time coming,” Starke said. “I’m glad the mayor finally got this thing down, but we had finished all the work that the city required. We were waiting for city inspections. Three times, they’d come, they’d inspect, they’d find more work to be done,” Starke explained. “The work that had to be done was expensive. And we did part of it, and then we had a contractor that took money and didn’t finish the work,” she added.
Management board president Nikki Berryman also commented on Sunday, telling the Post she was “incensed” at accusations that the board hadn’t worked to make the building inspection-ready. She claimed the board spent over $3 million on renovations. “The city would come to inspect, but they would always find something else. Of course they would. It’s a 100-year-old building,” Berryman said.
