New York’s pedestrians suffer all sorts of insults, but scaffolding is particularly undignified — you can’t feel like you are striving through the world’s greatest city, with its striking juxtapositions of buildings and sky, when you are forced to spelunk through a dank, temporary hallway from which you emerge feeling like you have been misted with silt and grime.
Scaffolding is rickety, ugly and temporary, but it is the worst kind of temporary — the kind that never ends.
The people of Second Avenue have been suffering for years with epic scaffolding, substrata explosions, and the puffs of white smoke — of the non-papal variety — but at least they are going to get a subway.
The improvements being made up above that scaffolding don’t even seem like improvements. They are usually a nebulous form of maintenance. No one likes to suffer for the cause of the status quo. It’s a bitter pill.
Scaffolding, like some Kafkaesque joke, has proliferated to the point where it has engulfed the most unlikely victim. Or maybe the most likely.
Josh Gilbert, the filmmaker, had an office on Broadway and Chambers Street in a building that was covered in scaffolding. He hated walking under it. No one was ever working on the building. And so he decided to complain to the Department of Buildings.
Which is how he found out the Department of Buildings was located in the building permanently encased in scaffolding. Josh made his complaint, but nothing came of it. He has since moved out. It’s now years later, and the scaffolding is still there.
* Thomas Beller’s most recent books are “The Sleep-Over Artist,” a novel, and “How To Be a Man,” a collection of essays. He publishes MrBellersneighborhood.com and teaches at Tulane.