New York City is set to dismantle the one positive legacy of its pandemic years.
I’m talking, of course, about outdoor dining culture, which took over city curbs beginning in June 2020. Initially, these primitive patios symbolized resilience and recovery. They provided a setting for the rebirth of public life at a time when interactions with neighbors consisted primarily of banging pots and pans out the window at sunset. When some pundits claimed that New York would never come back, that plywood meant someone believed in the future. They were a lifeline for the city’s restaurants and their workers during the year when indoor dining was severely restricted, and put eyes on the street when the street was emptier than ever.
And all that was thanks to a mere 8,000 of the city’s 3 million curbside parking spaces.
So, why is New York going to tear down its dining shacks? Some people think they look shabby. Others think they provide a habitat for rats. Some say the sheds constitute a “privatization” of public space. How public that space was is up for debate. It was storage space for private automobiles, and to private automobiles it will return—if the City Council goes ahead with a plan to permit curbside eating only in the warmer months of the year.
In the end, the diffuse charms of dining outside have proved no match for the particular grievances of restaurants’ neighbors. The restaurant lobby, already derided as a “special child” for getting this opportunity in the first place, seems to have run out of influence with a civic establishment that is pathologically averse to change. (It has taken nearly three years to come up with a compromise for the “temporary” program created in the spring of 2020.)
What the City Council has planned, according to Streetsblog, is to require restaurants to dismantle their curb structures during the colder months. Sidewalk dining will be permitted year-round.
New York’s hybrid approach is similar to the program in Paris, where restaurants, cafes, and bars are permitted to occupy parking spots between April and October.
But there are some differences. Paris allows only simple, open structures with see-through walls and no roofs. (Design guidelines are here.) These are easier and cheaper to install, and their spareness solves many of the problems with New York’s outdoor dining, including the rats’ nests and the opacity that shields the priciest tables from the hullabaloo of the sidewalk.
These ad hoc dining rooms are made safe and pleasant by Paris’ aggressive approach to countering bad driving—the speed limit is under 20 mph and enforced by new infrastructure. In New York, the speed limit is 25 mph—but seldom obeyed. That’s one reason the city required bunker-like structures to begin with.
Opponents of New York City’s plan fear that the seasonal restriction will quash the diversity of the Open Restaurants program, as outer-borough and low-priced establishments drop out. And if Paris is any guide, that will indeed happen. There, between 2021 and 2022, the seasonal system cut the number of curb-lane restaurant terraces by two-thirds, from 12,000 to 4,000.
In some respects, the outdoor dining program has become a scapegoat for New York City’s slow progress on other issues. Rats do indeed nest in the patios, but the true rat bonanza is the city’s inexplicable insistence on having trash piled up on the sidewalk instead of containerized in the parking lane. Parking may be marginally harder to find thanks to the dining spaces, but that’s mostly because the city is giving the most valuable land on earth away for free—not because less than 1 percent of its spaces disappeared.
Other problems associated with Open Restaurants could be solved with better design guidelines. The council’s concession that dining can happen year-round on sidewalks gets the spatial crunch precisely backward: Most sidewalks should be cleared of tables and chairs, which in many places verge on an ADA violation, so that they can be used by pedestrians. And the patios should be transparent—an addition to the life of the street rather than a walled-off loss. That’s the core principle of outdoor dining: You people-watch and people look right back at you. It’s one that some of the high-end restaurant sheds have tried to dispose of.
That presence of people eating on the street is good for something besides restaurants. It has kept streets feeling busy, multiplying interactions between friends and neighbors, even in winter. It has made space for larger groups and immunocompromised diners and people with dogs. At times, it even creates a sense of joy.
Yes, it does represent a concession of public space to private business, allowing restaurants to double or even triple the size of their dining rooms (until now, basically for free). But here, critics miss the forest for the trees. Almost all of New York’s curb space is privatized, allocated to a minority’s parking needs. In an early critique of the restaurant sheds, former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff wrote that they should be taken down to allow for a wholesale rethinking of the curb lane, which could be allocated to deliveries, bike storage, trash pickup, and truly public space, like playgrounds and benches. Sure, bring it on. But the City Council has none of that in its sights. Just free parking.
There’s a bigger problem here. New York’s sidewalk restaurants contribute sales tax revenue where there used to be none. As post-COVID budget realities set in, the city ought to be thinking about how to take in more dollars from the historically underutilized curb lane. As the former Department of Transportation head Janette Sadik-Khan said, the DOT is the city’s biggest real estate developer. It just does precious little with the power.
Jobs and taxes from restaurant patios won’t fill the hole left by missing office workers. But the restaurants light New York’s path forward in a way that’s not purely financial. As the city loses its magic pull on the region’s commuters, it will need to find new ways to trade on its strengths. Parking isn’t one of them, and anyone who really wants to have an easy time parking a car will soon head for grayer pastures.
New York has better streets, however, than just about every city in the country. Long neglected to traffic, they could hold the key to improvements not limited to better trash disposal. They might furnish more places for older New Yorkers to sit, spaces for kids to play, a quieter, cleaner public realm, a faster route for buses and a safer one for bikes. Restaurants are only the beginning of that transition, hopefully not its end.
