Sidewalk Sheds in NYC: When Your Building Needs One (and Who Puts It Up)
Walk down almost any busy street in Queens and you will pass under one: a green wooden walkway with a solid roof, bright lights, and posts at the curb. It is easy to treat it as part of the street furniture, something that has always been there and will eventually go away. In fact, that […]
Stucco Cracks: Hairline or Serious? A Homeowner’s Guide
Fresh Meadows wears stucco proudly. The neighborhood’s single-family homes and garden-apartment buildings carry it on fronts, sides and garden walls, a finish that suits the area’s brick-and-stucco streets. And almost every one of those walls cracks somewhere. A new homeowner’s first spring walk around the house usually finds them: a fine line near a window […]
Tree Roots vs Your Sidewalk: Who Fixes It in NYC?
Walk any mature street in the northern Bronx and you will see the same quiet standoff: a street tree doing exactly what street trees do, and a sidewalk slowly losing the argument. In front of the North Side’s pre-war apartment buildings and brick houses, big old trees shade the walk in summer and, underneath it, […]
Local Law 11 Cycle 10: A Building Owner’s Timeline for 2026–2029
New York City’s Facade Inspection and Safety Program — FISP, the law most owners still call Local Law 11 — does not run on a single deadline. Cycle 10, the inspection cycle now underway, is really three deadlines, and which one binds your building is decided by something as unglamorous as the last digit of […]
Sidewalk Violation in NYC? What Happens Next, Step by Step
The envelope is unremarkable, which is part of why it is easy to put off: a notice from the city’s transportation department, addressed to the property owner, saying the sidewalk in front of your building has been inspected and found defective. If you own a pre-war building in Jerome Park, that letter can feel like […]
Front Stoops and Steps: When to Repair, When to Rebuild
Every Hastings-on-Hudson front door is reached by a climb. The village’s pre-war houses sit above their streets on sloped, terraced lots, and the steps that connect street to front door do more work than any other masonry on the house. They carry every arrival and departure, take the hill’s runoff from above, and spend each […]