New York Needs To Take the Sheds Off the Outdoor Dining Menu

Now that it’s spring, the idea of dining outside is again a pleasant possibility, and in New York City there are more options for doing so than ever. Avenues and side streets that for generations saw little foot traffic, especially after dark, have been reborn as theaters of vibrant life and, yes, happiness. Before the pandemic, there were roughly 1,400 licensed outdoor cafes in the five boroughs; now there are more than 12,000. The process of applying for and receiving permission to set up outdoor dining, which once took years, is now possible in a matter of weeks. Legislation before the City Council aims to make outdoor dining a permanent feature of New York City, a wise proposal that seems likely to pass. As great as the success of sidewalk dining has been, the sheds that make it possible have been less welcomed. Many of them are substantial structures that, in size and solidity, amount to acts of architecture. At the same time, their provisional nature has ensured that, if they are indeed architecture, they are bad architecture, often little more than lean-tos slapped together to form yet one more eye-sore and yet one more impediment in the lives of our beleaguered pedestrians. In an intolerable act of usurpation, some restaurants have occupied hundreds of square feet of the pavement that, let us not forget, belongs by ancient right to the citizens of New York. In the process, these restaurants often seize, free of charge, as much space as they actually rent. Some of these structures, incidentally, are closed on all sides, thus entirely undermining the “outdoor” part of the equation and limiting the free circulation of air for which they were created in the first place.The solution proposed by the Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the city’s sidewalks, seems exactly right: Outdoor dining should certainly continue, but restaurants must replace their present semi-permanent structures with tents and umbrellas that can be quickly raised and quickly dismantled, as needed. These outdoor structures, let us remember, emerged amid the darkest and earliest days of the pandemic, when indoor dining was strictly prohibited. Long afterward, even as conditions began to improve, indoor seating was limited to 25 percent of capacity. Today, with the pandemic seemingly on the wane and with indoor dining once again at full capacity, the claims of public health seem far less relevant than they once did. Over the course of the pandemic, we have learned certain things. New Yorkers positively enjoy outdoor dining in fair weather, from May to mid-October, and maybe a little earlier and a little later if we’re lucky. Few would prefer to eat outdoors in inclement weather — especially in winter, even under heat-lamps — if they had the option to dine indoors. For this reason, it makes sense that the architectural context in which such dining occurs should be as flexible and as temporary as possible.It is ironic that one of the main reasons restaurants have been able to seize public space in the first place is that, in recent years, that space has been reclaimed, in a series of hard-won battles, from the automobiles that were the focus of urban planning for much of the past hundred years. The energetic reduction of the role of cars in urban life has been, worldwide, one of the most inspiring developments of recent years. Unfortunately, even as that space has been liberated from the thrall of cars, it has rarely been given back to pedestrians. Rather it has been surrendered once again to interests that are often opposed to pedestrian traffic, among them bikes, motorized scooters, and now outdoor dining sheds. New York was once one of the great walking cities of the world and it should be a top priority of the Adams administration to restore it to that status. To that end, the proposed legislation regarding outdoor dining represents a step in the right direction.

New York Needs To Take the Sheds Off the Outdoor Dining Menu

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