WILLIAMSBURG — A beloved stretch of sidewalk scaffolding was granted landmark status Tuesday after city officials concluded that removing it would cause “unnecessary disruption to a thriving ecosystem of pigeons, delivery bicycles and people standing outside bars.”

Installed in 2007 as an emergency safety measure, the structure has since become a neighborhood institution, outlasting three mayors, several generations of restaurants and one rent-stabilized rumor. The hearing lasted four hours, mostly because the commissioners kept asking witnesses to point at “the building,” and the witnesses kept pointing at the scaffold.

“I literally have never seen the building,” said one resident who moved to Brooklyn last month and has been giving directions by it ever since. “You go under the thing, past the other thing, and if you hit daylight you’ve gone too far.”

We can’t imagine the block without it.”— A resident who moved here last month

The Landmarks Preservation Commission praised the scaffold’s “remarkable integrity.” Very little of the original pipe has been replaced, they noted, though several poles have been repainted by successive waves of wheatpaste, stickers, and one person who was definitely not supposed to have a key to the padlock.

A historian hired by the block association testified that the scaffold qualifies as a cultural landscape. Under it, she said, the neighborhood has hosted first dates, last dates, a pop-up sock sale, and the only reliable shade on the block between noon and three. The pigeons submitted no written testimony but were observed nodding.

The Department of Buildings, which issued the original permit when the coffee shop underneath was still a coffee shop, said it was “pleased to close the file.” The file is a banker’s box labeled TEMPORARY in marker that has itself become temporary only in the philosophical sense.

Not everyone celebrated. A contractor who has been “about to take it down in the spring” since 2011 said the designation complicates a schedule he described as “fluid, like the G train, or my invoices.” He asked whether landmark status comes with a plaque. The city said yes.

The plaque commemorating the scaffold’s permanence will be installed beneath the scaffold at an unspecified later date. Officials asked the public not to stand in the spot where the plaque will go, a request the public has been accidentally honoring for nineteen years by standing everywhere else. ◆