In normal times, New York’s omnipresent walls of scaffolding are meant to keep people safe from crumbling facades.

Now, one city scaffolding firm is using its product to keep people safe from COVID-19.

Urban Umbrella sells what it bills as high-end scaffolding, using a blend of recycled steel and translucent plastic panels in place of the familiar cross-braced pipes and plywood.

Traditionally, it has marketed the product to luxury retailers like Louis Vuitton and Ralph Lauren that don’t want to settle for the standard-issue beams and boards.

Over the last year, though, the company has turned to helping businesses and building owners navigate the pandemic, offering what it call its COVID-19 Comeback Kit — sidewalk canopies based on its scaffolding design that can be outfitted with features like heat lamps and hand sanitizer dispensers.

The idea, said CEO Ben Krall, is to help safely bridge the gap between the street and indoors, providing a space for the various activities — temperature checks, dining al fresco, outdoor sales transactions — that COVID-19 has made de rigueur.

“We’re that main artery between the sidewalk and the retail store, and there is a lot of friction right now around, OK, can we go in the store, can we not go in the store, where are we supposed to go?” he said.

Originally developed by a team of Colombian architects, Urban Umbrella’s scaffolding first gained attention when it won a design contest sponsored by the Bloomberg administration in 2009. It made little commercial headway, though, until Krall bought out the firm in 2016.

“People thought I was nuts to leave a successful venture capital career and throw away a law degree to go start a scaffolding company,” Krall said. And, well, when he puts it like that, you can see where those people might have had a point.

Krall is convinced, though, that there’s untapped opportunity in the scaffolding biz. The last year has been a busy one, he said, noting that the company has grown 30 percent during the pandemic.

High design doesn’t come cheap, though. Krall said Urban Umbrella is about four to five times more expensive than conventional scaffolding. The company currently has about 25,000 feet of its product up throughout New York City.

Frank Sciame, head of New York development firm Sciame Development was one of the jurors at the city scaffolding contest that Urban Umbrella’s design won more than a decade ago.

“It was architecturally pleasing. It was well lit. It was an improvement over the typical sidewalk scaffold,” Sciame recalled. “I applaud what they did.”

Krall and company shouldn’t rest on their laurels, though. Sciame is himself working on a new design that he said “will be transformative.”

Looks like scaffolding is a platform for success.