Building scaffolding fell onto a public city bus at West 125th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem this morning, the New York Times reported, injuring 17 people. “We pulled into the stop and I heard a falling sound of something collapsing toward the back, and the back of the bus filled up with smoke,” said Sasha Chavkin, a reporter for Columbia University’s new investigative journalism website, the New York World. “People were running from the back and screaming. After about a minute the bus driver let everyone off the bus. I talked to a kid in the back who said he thought he was going to die. He said rubble had fallen through the windows of the bus.” Fire officials described the injuries as minor and not life threatening. The address from which the scaffolding fell was not immediately available. [NYT]

Kenneth Buettner, president of York Scaffold Equipment Corp., says this year is going to be a tough one for the scaffolding industry.

From the January issue: Developers aren’t the only ones hurting as hundreds of construction
sites citywide sit dormant. The scaffolding companies that provide the
pipe frames around those stalled projects are facing tough times too,
and are expecting things to worsen in the New Year. “There is less work out there than there was a year ago, and there
is less than two years ago,” said Kenneth Buettner, president of the
Long Island City-based York Scaffold Equipment Corp. “2009 was a year
about which to be concerned, but 2010 is a year of which to be afraid.” When a project stalls (and according to the city’s Department of Buildings, 500 of them have in the five boroughs), developers typically hurry to remove scaffolding, Buettner said. Part of the reason they do that is to avoid paying rent. Sidewalk sheds, which protect passersby from falling objects, are legally required to stay up on structures higher than 40 feet. But the rent from those sheds don’t provide much relief in terms of revenue to scaffolding companies, said Buettner, who is also on the board of directors for the Hoisting and Scaffolding Trade Association of New York. [more]

At the time, it seemed like a good idea. When Pure Yoga opened one and a half years ago at 203 East 86th Street, this purveyor of inner peace opted to adorn the upper portion of its two story façade with a “living wall” of plants, in varied shapes and colors, that covered every inch of its expansive surface. It was ably designed by Green Living Technologies. Quite aside from such karmic enhancements as the living wall conferred, it also proved to be a shrewd marketing maneuver. Though not the only such wall in the city, it was and remains sufficiently rare that it was able to garner a good deal of invaluable publicity. Pure Yoga, however, did not reckon with one of the sad facts of life in the big city — that only the rarest of buildings in Manhattan manages to escape the ubiquitous outrage of scaffolding bridges. And so the living wall had not been up six months when the building it inhabits, the Colorado, decided to do a bit of refacing. The scaffolding went up about a year ago and, as always, it sliced sheer across the second story of the building, entombing the living wall in constant darkness, notwithstanding its precious southern exposure.
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From left: Pure Yoga’s “living wall” at 203 East 86th Street, as it was intended, and wall today, after scaffolding was installed (right photo source: A Fine Blog)

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