The few roadway dining structures that survived the City Council’s shortsighted 2023 law severely limiting them had to be removed for the season on Saturday. The new Council, under likely new Speaker Julie Menin, that takes office on Jan. 1 must revise the law and bring back the restaurants that blossomed during COVID.
The current Council, under Speaker Adrienne Adams, blundered badly in restricting the sheds to operate on the roadbeds only between April 1 and Nov. 29 each year, thus the shutdown for winter we just saw. That Menin herself is a sponsor of a bill to reestablish year-round outdoor dining on the streets is a welcome sign of a better future.
The COVID pandemic was a horrible, traumatic time for the city, coming on the heels of multiple immense challenges just in the prior 20 years, from 9/11 to the financial crisis to Sandy and so on. It’s very difficult to think of anything positive that could come out of such death, illness and economic and social devastation, but New Yorkers have spent centuries finding silver linings, and one of those was outdoor dining.
Indeed, the city had already been on a path towards opening up more spaces for pedestrian public and commercial use, but the pandemic supercharged that trend out of pure necessity.
For months, the availability of this outdoor dining, including both sheds and sidewalk space, was a lifeline not only for New Yorkers ourselves but the businesses that were literally able to survive exclusively as a result of the opportunity to provide socially distanced seating.
At the end of the day, what’s not to like? Restaurants get more seating — and if you’ve tried recently to get a table pretty much anywhere in, say, Greenwich Village between Thursday evening and Sunday night, you know seating is a precious resource — and people have more options for where they want to spend their time.
We’ve gotten COVID under control, but it’s not like infectious disease has stopped being a problem, and especially for people who are particularly cautious or immunocompromised, the availability of outdoor dining can basically equate to the ability to dine out at all.
Yes, we understand that there are some concerns, including availability of parking — though, frankly, that should be a secondary concern in a majority pedestrian city — and the possibility of rats making their homes or buffets in the structures. Yet very few worthwhile public policies are also easy or without complication, so really there’s no reason why our leaders shouldn’t be able to figure this out. In fact, they already tried and ultimately failed to adapt the ad hoc COVID program in ways that were entirely predictable.
This Editorial Board, along with a cross-section of other civic and business groups, saw the writing on the wall that the outdoor dining program as currently implemented would have the exact problems that it does. Relatively few business owners want to navigate the bureaucratic and practical pitfalls of the convoluted process, particularly having to entirely deconstruct and subsequently reconstruct the structures seasonally.
We are pleased that city lawmakers like Menin are now weighing the notion of making the program year-round, simplifying the application and cutting fees, straightforward steps that might finally put to rest all of the back-and-forth over how to get our businesses to actually participate and our residents to use the dining sheds. While we appreciate the work that Community Boards do citywide, they don’t need to weigh in on absolutely everything. Let the sheds rise.
Dining and Cooking