Outdoor dining have become incredibly controversial. Credit: Nandani Bridglal

Almost everything the pandemic will be remembered for is obviously horrific: the deaths, the quietude of once-lively city streets punctuated only by sirens, the families and friends unable to share one another’s company, the students falling behind as teachers struggled with Zoom classes. It was a horrible time with long-standing repercussions, which does serve to really highlight the very few silver linings.

A significant one is something I’ve written about abundantly: the sudden and forced implementation of something resembling an expansive social services system in a country that has long been resistant to one. All of a sudden, the government was boosting unemployment, providing additional childcare credits, freezing insurance disenrollments, and directly giving people cash. Even as the economy cratered, child poverty halved and savings rose. The sky didn’t fall. Then we did away with almost all of it, but I think the public having had a taste of it is a memory that will endure, and a large part of why economic attitudes have been stubbornly gloomy despite an on-paper booming economy.

Anyway, here I actually want to focus on a smaller-scale and much more local positive upshot of the pandemic:, the dining sheds that popped up around the city on roadways and sidewalks as restaurants reopened and struggled to comply with Covid distancing guidelines. This might seem like a bit of a 180 from the safety net issue I mentioned above, but the key through-line is the idea of reclaiming or demanding something public, wrestling it back to benefit people writ large instead of some small subset or set of interests. The sheds became a defining image of the city’s Covid era, as New Yorkers took to the streets to commune with one another while indoor gatherings remained deadly.

I’ll admit that this is a somewhat controversial opinion in a culture that has come to view the right to drive and park freely as practically a public good. Yet we’re in a city where the majority of the population does not own or drive a car, and that’s especially true in the denser and more restaurant-heavy areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The public space for private vehicles was more of a concession to a slice of typically wealthier New Yorkers and out-of-towners, whereas the sheds provided more of the so-called third spaces that have been on the decline, giving a lifeline to local businesses, and returning some vitality to a city that seemed to teeter on the edge.

It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Residents of some neighborhoods have complained about abandoned sheds sitting empty and blighting city streets, to the point that Mayor Eric Adams did a photo op sledgehammering one down two years ago. There are some legitimate concerns about the sheds being hubs for rats, which can congregate under them and feast on the remnants left behind by diners. And as car-free as NYC is in comparison to other cities, people do have cars, not to mention the explosion of delivery trucks typically making multiple stops per block per day to serve online shoppers.

Sheds became a defining image of the city’s Covid era. Credit: Nandani Bridglal

The City Council tried to thread this needle last year with a bill establishing rules for the sheds. What they landed on was authorizing sidewalk sheds year-round, but allowing roadway sheds to operate only seasonally, from April until November, with restaurant operators being forced to break down the sheds at the end of this period and rebuild them the next year. Even when the legislation was first announced, a lot of advocates and commentators argued it spelled doom for the road sheds (my friends at the excellent Hell Gate penned a sardonic column celebrating the triumph of “NYC’s historic parking spots” under the byline “A. Car”). Bar and restaurant owners immediately warned that they would not be able to comply with these requirements and would leave the program entirely. The Council went ahead and passed the law

Now, it seems like these fears are panning out. Public records obtained by Streetsblog’s Kevin Duggan show that only 23 businesses citywide are scheduled for public hearings, a requirement under the new rules for the roadway shed program, with the August 3 application deadline for existing sheds now just weeks away. The city insisted to Streetsblog that there are actually “hundreds of applications” that just haven’t been scheduled yet, but provided no specifics. If the final number is anywhere near this, it would represent an immense decline from the roughly 12,500 sheds estimated to be in use at the peak of the outdoor dining program, even accounting for the unspecified number of sidewalk sheds that don’t have the same onerous requirements.

Outdoor dining has remained popular for people who are Covid-conscious. Credit: Renata Tyburczy

It’s a bit telling that the program that seems to have been effectively killed off is the one that took away car space as opposed to the one that is taking up already-constrained pedestrian space. I think we’ve all had the experience of trying to squeeze past what’s left of a sidewalk largely taken over by a dining shed while a single person’s absurdly oversized truck takes up the same amount of space ten feet away on the street.

I will be the first to admit that the design of some of the structures was not necessarily conducive to the purported initial goal of reducing Covid exposure; the ones that were pretty open and spaced out, sure, but the enclosed structures that were basically just “indoors but on the roadway,” not so much. Yet they became little symbols of life and enjoyment around the city in the midst of this terrible time, and I’d argue that they’ve improved quality of life even for those people not using them, by making streets livelier and more transited and providing a boost to local businesses.

I really hope that these don’t end up as just another memory from the fever dream of the Covid years. I do expect that, if these really do start coming down en masse in the coming months (as business owners abandon the program in compliance with the city’s new rules), the public will balk, and maybe we can find some new arrangement that better navigates this complex city’s myriad needs.

Felipe De La Hoz is an immigration-focused journalist who has written investigative and analytic articles, explainers, essays, and columns for the New Republic, The Washington Post, New York Mag, Slate,...

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