By Gus Saltonstall
A sidewalk shed was torn off an Upper West Side building during the storm on Saturday night.
The storm’s strong winds ripped a section of the shed to the ground that was attached to 276 Riverside Drive, near the corner of West 100th Street.
“Debris was blown part way up the street and a pile of material landed on parked cars,” Lawrence Langham wrote in an email to West Side Rag.
In the immediate aftermath, police closed the street off to clean up the debris and to make sure residents did not walk underneath the structure.
WSR visited the building on Monday morning and spoke to a doorman at 276 Riverside Drive, who confirmed that nobody was injured during the incident. “Nothing like that has ever happened,” added the doorman, who did not provide his name.
The debris had been picked up by Monday morning, but the missing pieces from the sidewalk shed were still visible.
The 276 Riverside Drive building is owned by Weinreb Management. Previous reporting in 2021 found that 10 of the 11 Manhattan buildings owned by the management company were swathed in sidewalk sheds at the time, including multiple buildings on the Upper West Side.
Weinreb Management also owns 51 West 86th Street, where a particularly notorious sidewalk shed came down after 19 years in 2025.
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A woman died in Chelsea 10+ years ago during a particularly windy day, killed by a flying slat of heavy plywood from a construction shed not unlike this one.
I’m sure the powers that be (and are so keen to protect us) are working overtime on an in-depth inspections on the construction quality and safety of the safety shed. Of course, with the full cooperation of the shed owner, for whom the safety of the public is of utmost importance. And they apologize for the inconvenience.
I just checked the NYC shed map and that shed’s been up since 2023 (I live a few blocks away, so I was pretty sure it had been up a while.) Isn’t it ironic that a structure meant to protect pedestrians might be the thing that ends up hurting them? Lucky no one was injured.
But you do wonder: who inspects the inspection-required sheds? How could pieces of this thing just blow off?
(Maybe this is because the building is owned by the notorious Weinreb Management, the UWS’s worst building owner.)