Flagpole installation inNew York City, NY

Flagpoles in New York City

Offices, hotels, hospitals, consulates and co-ops stacked on top of one another, with almost every pole going onto a roof, a plaza or a pavement rather than a lawn. We cover New York City and the five boroughs area, including Wall Street and the Financial District, Midtown and Fifth Avenue, Hudson Yards, Downtown Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Long Island City, the Bronx Hub, St. George on Staten Island and the East River waterfronts.

Wind here. New York City sits in a tower-channelled urban area, which works out to roughly 115 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. New York City does not send you to a national wind map at all. The figure comes out of a table in the city's own building code, and it sits near the 115 mph the rest of the state reads. Any figure of that kind is measured over open ground, and a street between two towers is not open ground, so downtown the shaft is sized for what the buildings do to the wind rather than for the table. The Landmarks Preservation Commission covers more than 38,000 properties, most of them inside its 150-odd historic districts, and any exterior change to one of them needs its own Landmarks sign-off alongside the Department of Buildings filing. Ground is the other thing. A pole standing on a structured slab behaves nothing like one standing in soil, so those foundations are drawn by an engineer. And there is rarely anywhere to stand a truck, so the approach is agreed before anything is ordered. One photograph of the spot, and one of the street outside it, saves a fortnight.

Most of the people who call us from New York City are building owners and managing agents, hotels, co-op and condominium boards, hospitals and universities, consulates and missions, schools and houses of worship, and contractors fitting out a roof or a plaza.