The shed that never came down.

Why they stay up

Local Law 11 has required a façade inspection every five years since 1980, and a building that fails one has to protect the pavement while it is repaired. The shed goes up for the repair. It stays up because renting the shed is, month after month, cheaper than doing the work, and because nothing in the law charges the owner for the pavement they are occupying.

Every New Yorker knows this. What nobody can easily find out is which sheds have been there longest, because the permit is published and the removal is not. 10,703 filings in the catalog include a sidewalk shed and 4,795 of them are not recorded as completed, closed or withdrawn.

The year the permit was issued

3,102 of the open ones carry a first permit date. A shed permitted in the last year is a building being repaired. The rows above that are a different kind of fact about the same pavement.

• 201794
• 2018437
• 2019496
• 2020318
• 2021427
• 202240
• 202375
• 2024176
• 2025281
• 2026758

Where they are

Longest since the permit was issued

Ordered by the first permit date the Department of Buildings published for the filing. Open the record for its exact status and identifiers.

Counted from the Department of Buildings job application filings, accessed Sep 14, 2026. A filing that has not been recorded as closed is not proof that the shed is still standing; the city does not publish removals.

What to do with it

If one of these is outside your window, the filing is the document to quote: it carries the job number, the applicant of record and the permit date. 311 takes complaints about a shed that is unsafe or abandoned, and the Department of Buildings publishes the inspection history against the same job number.

The biggest things being built · What each filing status means · Every dataset behind the site