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No hard hats beyond this point: B’klyn courthouse sports perma-scaffolding but no construction

No hard hats beyond this point: B’klyn courthouse sports perma-scaffolding but no construction
Community Newspaper Group / Jaime Lutz

Disorder outside the court!

Scaffolding has shrouded the Downtown sidewalk around the Brooklyn Supreme Court for nearly two years, but no work appears to have happened despite the fact that the construction-enabling contraption costs the city thousands of dollars each month.

“They rent monthly, so believe me, they’ll call us as soon as they’re finished with their project,” said Troy Mazanek, a spokesman for Swing Staging Inc., which installed the overhead walkway, called a sidewalk shed, in January 2012, according to city records.

A month’s rent is $6 per foot, according to Mazanek, meaning that the two blocks worth of sidewalk shed around the building on Adams Street between Joralemon and Johnson streets costs the city $3,450 every month, plus the $86,250 it paid for the initial installation. Surely there must be some major overhaul going on up above for the government to spend $162,150 and counting on this scaffolding, right?

Wrong. Maybe.

The Department of Buildings says that the apparatus was erected for minor repairs on the courthouse’s exterior and that the sidewalk shed will be gone when the job is done, but department spokeswoman Gloria Chin would not say what the repairs entail and department records show no applications to do work on the building.

Sidewalk sheds are installed to either facilitate construction or when conditions on a building are dangerous to the public and they cannot be removed until the project is finished or the problem is addressed, according to Chin. But on repeat visits to the courthouse by The Brooklyn Paper over the past two months there have been no signs of construction above or around the framework.

That is not to say that there have not been problems with the facade of the 45-year-old building. A similar but smaller sidewalk shed went up in 2004 after a building inspection found that the outside wall presented a danger to pedestrians, according to building department records.

Reach reporter Jaime Lutz at [email protected] or by calling (718) 260-8310. Follow her on Twitter @jaime_lutz.