New Yorkers who expected a swift, surgical removal of the pandemic-driven outdoor dining sheds — along with their loud, late-night music and wholesale colonization of streets and sidewalks — will be disappointed.
The shantytowns will be with us until 2023, according to the Department of Transportation’s new “estimated time frame” to launch the permanent phase of the Open Restaurants program. This recent, overlooked DOT edict means the city must first make zoning changes before it can even submit outdoor eatery guidelines to the City Council and the mayor for final approval.
Outdoor dining sheds won’t be updated or improved until the permanent program launches two years from now.
What a byzantine, only-in-New York rigamarole. The idea that rules for outdoor tables and chairs should undergo the same micro-scrutiny as giant new skyscrapers like One Vanderbilt is preposterous.
Stephen Hanson, an investor in Rosemary’s East Side and former owner of the giant B.R. Guest empire, who knows the city bureaucracy well, bemoaned the updated timeline, saying: “It will take months before they could even process all the applications.”
Andrew Rigie, head of the New York City Hospitality Alliance that has spearheaded the industry’s effort to upgrade the rules, largely defended the new timetable.
“Most people understand we need to come up with a more thoughtful, more sustainable outdoor program,” he told The Post. “The old one was an emergency measure to save thousands and thousands of jobs and give people a place to enjoy themselves.”
But, “this is a big, complex process. Every street and every neighborhood is different.”
Yet cleaning up the shed sprawl shouldn’t take two years. The first, most critical step to getting it done faster and better? Boot the DOT from the lead role — which a new mayor, who’ll take office on Jan. 1, can do without legislative or legal interference.
But replace the DOT with what? Simple: a restaurant-savvy alfresco dining czar who can overrule agencies and answers only to the mayor. And here’s what he or she should insist upon for city sheds well before 2023:
- Begin charging owners fees for the extra outdoor seats — as was done before the pandemic, when sidewalk licenses didn’t come free. Since last summer, places could multiply seats exponentially if they had the good luck to be on corners with lots of sidewalk space on two sides — like humble bar Finnegans Wake did on the Upper East Side.
- End the takeover of adjacent-building sidewalks. At first, restaurants were only supposed to use the area in front of their own spaces, but later the city allowed them to make deals with neighboring landlords to spread far and wide.
- Reroute some bike lanes. Many lanes currently run between sidewalks and eating enclosures. On Second Avenue uptown, customers and waitstaff risk life and limb trying to cross the speedway where cyclists whiz by as fast as cars in the street. Let’s move the lanes outside the eating areas.
- No more bare plywood. Large windows should be required all around every outdoor dining shed to avoid catastrophes like Da Long Yi Hot Pot’s creepy, opaque structure on Elizabeth Street uglifying the city.
- Throw the book at owners who keep street setups in place long after they’re no longer used. Da Long Yi Hot Pot actually stopped using their shed months ago, and yet there it still stands — hideous and abandoned. The Ainsworth on Fulton Street has been closed for months, but timber from their street shed still blocks traffic and takes up badly needed parking spots.
- Mute the racket. Some places blast out loud, recorded or live music. TVs mounted above tables pump up the volume. How did an “emergency” program to rescue endangered restaurants become a license to turn the town into an open-air sports bar?
- Finally, how about requiring proof of customer vaccination for outdoor sheds as well as indoors? Most restaurants cram diners into their mostly enclosed “outdoor sheds” more tightly than they do inside.
With a little pragmatism, we can make our streets look and feel less like a junkyard/frat house and we don’t have to wait two years to do it. But these measures might be too rational and obvious for street-dining dictators who have little taste for common sense.
