Scaffolding at NYC’s largest high school finally coming down after more than 5 years

A massive array of scaffolding that’s cocooned New York City’s largest high school for more than five years is at long last scheduled to come down next month, according to the city’s School Construction Authority.

Since 2019, the city has worked to repair the 90-year-old Brooklyn Tech High School in a job that was delayed after an April earthquake revealed new cracks in the building, officials said. But when the school’s nearly 6,000 students return from winter break, the scaffolding that’s been in place their entire high school careers is set to be gone.

The building’s wooden and metal exoskeleton is older than 98% of the scaffolding in the city, according to buildings department data. In some cases, sidewalk sheds loom in place for more than a decade. Elected officials, including Mayor Eric Adams, have sought to reform building codes so the sidewalk sheds aren’t necessary and do not linger.

But the scaffolding at Brooklyn Tech was in place for so long because of the extent of the repairs needed to keep the building running, according to School Construction Authority spokesperson Kevin Ortiz.

“We recognize that the scaffold has been a source of frustration for the community,” Ortiz said in a statement. “However, we are nearing the completion of this project and expect to begin removing the scaffold in January.”

“The planned roof and façade work has been a significant undertaking, given the building’s scale — it spans an entire city block and includes over 20 individual roof structures,” he said.

The scaffolding that’s slated for removal is only the latest iteration of a long line of sidewalk sheds on the building in recent decades. The structures have been the subject of some Brooklyn Tech students’ creative writing exercises and have acted as a ladder for urban explorers who climb up to the 420-foot-high defunct radio tower on the building’s roof.

“We had scaffolding for a very long time, then they removed it, and the next day this one came up,” said Angelika Richards, who has lived across the street from the school since 1994.

The saga of sidewalk sheds and scaffolding is revealed by work permits dating back to 2008 as well as photographs on Google Street View. The photos show that one corner of the building has had some form of sidewalk shed attached to it since October 2013.