What Are the Types of Balcony Enclosures and When Do They Have to Be Altered?
Sept. 11, 2015 — When a balcony is enclosed, the process can be as simple as nailing screens to a wooden frame or as elaborate as knocking down part of the outer wall to extend an extant room. Even the simpler of these two types can present safety issues.
"People do install screen enclosures on their balconies," says engineer Eric Cowley, principal at Cowley Engineering, "and the Department of Buildings (DOB) requires people to get permits for screens and divider walls" so that they're compliant with wind loads. And for good reason.
"We had a divider wall with a gate in it blow off a building on East 62nd Street — [and land] on a building next door."
Additionally, Cowley says that owners "have put in wood decking or tile that raises the floor level to where the railing height is no longer compliant," meaning at least 42 inches high. "On a job [at] Riverside Drive, the board issued a new rule and we removed [such decks] and measured [the railings] to make sure the heights were compliant."
When must balcony enclosures be altered? "You open the sliding door and you have a step down onto the balcony, and many of our seniors had somebody build a wooden subfloor on top of the concrete floor so that the step down was not so significant," observes Brendan Keany, the general manager at the 10-building, 2,820-apartment Chelsea co-op complex known as Penn South. "And sometimes they'd put [in] indoor/outdoor carpet."
In every instance of this, he says, this meant the railing was now less than 42 inches from the raised floor. "So we had to insist — and we did it at our expense — on removing the subfloors." That height requirement becomes moot in the case of completely enclosed balconies with walls or with windows serving as walls, notes Kenneth Jacobs, a partner in the law firm Smith, Buss & Jacobs.