The Death of Outdoor Dining Is a Blow to New York’s Vitality

First it was the death of congestion pricing — and with it, around $10 billion from federal matching programs for much-needed improvements to the subways and other mass transit, eliminating as many as 100,000 jobs. Then it was the slow abandonment of bus lanes (the city is on track to build just 27 miles of the 150 miles promised by Mayor Eric Adams). And now, bit by bit, New York City’s overwhelmingly popular outdoor dining is collapsing.

It’s hard to imagine a more illogical, infuriating and self-defeating series of capitulations than those made by New York’s leadership — from the governor’s office to city boards — to the relatively small demographic of auto-reliant New Yorkers and commuters, as well as those city residents who seem to think their neighborhoods should resemble quiet suburbs.

On one street near where I live in Brooklyn, almost all of the dining sheds are gone. In spaces that would once have fed dozens of people in an evening, there instead sits a single car, occasionally two. Where people could have socialized, eaten and supported the local economy, helping small businesses stay afloat, there is now space that serves the desire to park. Across the city, the story is similar: The sheds have gone, fallen victim to onerous new rules under which just 2,600 restaurants applied for outdoor dining permits, a far cry from the more than 12,000 that had used the pandemic-era program.

For restaurants, the stakes are bleak: They must tear down, at great cost, the structures just recently built, also at great cost. They will often have to lay off staff members. They will lose revenue. And once the structures are down, rebuilding them is costly. Restaurant owners note that dining structures — often professionally built, some award-winning — cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to build and cannot be remade on a whim. Once down for a season, they’re probably down for good.