CB 1 Votes to Scale Back Outdoor Dining Sheds; Wants No More Than Two Per City Block

Opposition appears to be mounting to scale back the outdoor dining sheds which helped restaurants survive during the darkest days of the pandemic.

Now, according to one community lobbying group, downtown is “saturated beyond endurance” by the proliferation of sheds.

The city data says there are nearly 13,000 of the sheds throughout the five boroughs, with 582 of these concentrated in the eight residential zip codes of downtown Manhattan. Included are 302 sheds that take up spaces on both sidewalks and roads, while 90 use the street, 173 use sidewalks only, and 17 utilize the city’s Open Streets program.

CUEUP wants no restaurants in the roadways [or curblanes] at all because it says “street sweepers haven’t cleaned restaurant-filled streets in more than two years.” The group then wants to prohibit more than two sidewalk shed permits per block, with an overall cap of 100 per community district. They also want a guarantee that pedestrians and wheelchair users have a clear path at least eight feet wide - or half of the sidewalk (whichever is greater).

At their April 25th meeting, Community Board 1 passed a resolution based on the CUEUP’s Open Dining Community Blueprint acknowledging that sheds sustained restaurants economically over the pandemic, but should now be pared back.

This expansion has been maintained by the Department of Transportation under the Open Restaurant program initiated by former mayor Bill De Blasio, a rebranding of the Sidewalk Café program that started before the pandemic. The city relaxed regulations to make it far easier to erect outdoor dining sheds when it was seen as a way to help a beleaguered industry survive.

The adopted resolution included language that specified giving “public space back to the public.”

In an interview with Our Town Downtown, CUEUP member Leif Arntzen stated that he was “heartened to see the community board adopting the community blueprint...it shows how widespread the problem is.” As Arntzen puts it, the blueprint allows for “expansion of industry, but in a reasonable way that doesn’t overly burden residents that need access to their sidewalks or their front doors.” Some other objectives of the blueprint included “ensure that New York’s outdoor dining is environmentally sound” and “restaurants are businesses, not charities. Treat them as such.”

Arntzen emphasized that the “biggest obstacle to this whole thing is information. There’s been so little neighborhood outreach and study done.” He noted that CUEUP found steady opposition from hospitality industry lobbyists, and was hoping that the outcome of the resolution would spread to other councilmembers citywide: “they only have so much time and resources to delve into these things. Have a conversation wherever it can take place.”