This summer’s dining hotspot isn’t a new restaurant in Williamsburg or the reopening of Gage & Tollner in Downtown Brooklyn. The best place in the city to tear into a dosa, a taco or an everything bagel is atop a dining platform built with two-by-fours and DIY lattices in a former parking space. Outdoor dining, starting as a pandemic lifeline, has gone from a seasonal attraction to an urban essential.
As the de Blasio administration presses ahead with plans to make it permanent, some community boards are now grumbling about keeping the sheds in place, blaming them for lost parking spaces, increasing vermin and loud noise. They should stand down and help us all find ways to improve upon this successful experiment, not reverse it.
The wood, sheetrock, lattice and fiberglass sheds — as diverse and idiosyncratic as the restaurants that have created them — were the product of ad hoc emergency rules but are now the physical, social and economic features of a city in rapid recovery. More than 11,000 restaurants are allowed to offer service on city streets and sidewalks, along with 359 Open Streets, where car traffic is restricted. New Yorkers have tasted the pleasures of eating and gathering outdoors, and there’s no turning that table.
But there’s more to permanent outdoor dining than just leaving tables and chairs where they are. Those DIY lattices won’t age well, may not be weatherproof or safe enough, and the intention was never to have streets look like shantytowns.
Then there’s the question of parking. Assuming that each restaurant permitted to operate in the street occupies 1.5 parking spaces — and many restaurants occupy more — there are 10,000 parking spaces formerly dominated by just a handful of cars have that now host dozens if not hundreds of people to eat, drink or sit down every day.
That may seem like a lot of spots; it is perhaps the largest one-year transfer of parking space in the city’s history. But in a city with 3 million parking spaces, this amounts to less than 1%. There is room for the program to grow, rapidly, and to reach more of the city’s many restaurant rows. First, we must get past the shouting about the loss of parking space.
If one business owner believes that allowing two customers to park in nearby spaces is a matter of economic life and death, the restaurant owner next door could make a stronger claim that allowing 20 patrons to eat in the space fronting their doors makes far more people happy while keeping that business afloat.
Outdoor dining also creates its own placemaking benefits, with more people bringing life and energy — street life — to the street. The streets in my West Village neighborhood crackle with voices instead of the drone of cars.
Yet sadly, this street life is where the greatest opposition to the restaurant program has shifted. Outdoor dining opponents declaim outdoor seating as breeding grounds for rats, noise and drunken disorder. The claim made at community meetings that “This isn’t Paris!” is perhaps the tersest summation of this argument. It was the same argument lodged against city bike lanes, bike share and plazas 10 years ago under the Bloomberg administration.
Opponents at the time said that reallocating street space to bikers and pedestrians would hobble businesses unable to get deliveries or provide parking for customers. Instead, retail sales increased on corridors and traffic was little changed from a decade ago.
It’s time for the outdoor dining program to be made permanent. But it’s also time for it to grow up, becoming a regulated city program with consistent siting and design guidelines, and dedicated enforcement. Ad hoc wooden shacks and stray tables make sense during an emergency, but we have long-term interests in protecting pedestrian and wheelchair access, aesthetics and reducing sidewalk clutter.
The Regional Plan Association is leading Alfresco NYC, a program to make restaurant and open streets available to more neighborhoods. The program, for which I serve as an advisor, will soon announce new guidance, detailing the design, dimensions and materials for the next generation of curbside platforms that provide safe and attractive seating. It is also offering awards for the best designs championing restaurants underrepresented among the 11,000 — parts of Eastern Queens and the Bronx and on Staten Island.
There must be an inclusive application process but also recruitment and counseling, so that undercapitalized businesses aren’t disadvantaged.
Most importantly, the entire city should benefit from the private use of this public space, and not just the restaurants and diners able to afford a meal. Year-round outdoor restaurant seating may be hard to digest for some, but it’s an essential ingredient of a city whose future is based on the people who live, walk and eat on its streets — and not just on the cars parked along it.
Sadik-Khan, former city transportation commissioner, is a principal with Bloomberg Associates.