With less than a week to go before applications close, only roughly 1,300 restaurants have applied to set up outdoor dining areas in the road or on the sidewalk — 90 percent fewer than the 12,500 that participated during the program's pandemic heyday.
The near-complete collapse of the popular al-fresco program follows an effort by the City Council and Mayor Adams to permit dining sheds in the roadway only as a seasonal program, requiring eateries to set up dining areas every March, take them down every December and then store them somewhere for four months — an onerous task for small restaurateurs.
At its peak two years ago, 12,500 restaurants had set up roadway or sidewalk cafes, with the thousands of roadway dining areas comprising an historic reallocation of the public realm away from cars. Now a mere 23 roadway setups are lined up for approval, according to public hearing notices first reported by Streetsblog.
The city won't say how many of the 1,300 applicants plan to set up in the roadway versus on the sidewalk. Department of Transportation spokesman Nick Benson said only that a "sizable portion" of the 1,300 would be in the roadway.
City officials have boasted that the new outdoor dining program will be an improvement over the previous sidewalk-cafe-only pre-Covid program, when there were 1,082 sidewalk set-ups and no roadway sheds taking up the public space in the curb that the city has for decades chosen to give drivers to store their vehicles, largely for free.
Businesses are starting to tear down their structures ahead of the deadline, including one Bedford-Stuyvesant cafe, which announced on Monday it would remove its beloved structure because the design regulations of the new program prohibit harder sides and roofs felt unsafe for customers.
"After much comtemplation [sic], we decided it would be easier just to let it go," the Maya Congee Cafe posted in on Instagram. "The major deciding factor is that it doesn’t feel safe for our customers to sit outside on a bus route with the new DOT rules (no roof and no sides)."
The low number of 1,300 total applicants — for sidewalk and roadway dining — "shocked" one restaurant owner, who built an elaborate structure on W. 14th Street and plans to apply for a renewal in the coming days.
"I would have expected at least 5,000. I’m shocked by that number," said Robert Sanfiz, executive director of La Nacional, a longtime Spanish restaurant.
Sanfiz said he will weigh whether it's worth it to set up a smaller structure in the roadway, since he has to now limit his new streetery to his establishment's frontage under the new regulations.
Judging by the numbers so far, New York is poised to repeat what happened in Paris two years ago when the numbers of outdoor structures plummeted from 12,000 to 4,000 after officials in the French capital made their program seasonal.
The decline is a missed opportunity for the Big Apple, said Jackson Chabot, director of Advocacy and Organizing at Open Plans (which shares a parent organization with Streetsblog).
"Of course business owners are thinking twice about time and money if they can’t use the curb space year round," Chabot said. "This program helps the city reach important goals in public space and economic recovery and it’s really incumbent on them to adjust, make it year round and ensure it thrives."
Under the new law, sidewalk setups in the pedestrian space can stay in place year-round and don't necessarily need to go through a public hearing, except in certain circumstances like community board opposition.
DOT on Monday issued a "last call" for owners of existing sheds, who have until the end of day Saturday to apply or else they'll have to tear down their structures.
"Last call! Businesses offering outdoor dining must apply to participate in Dining Out NYC by the end of the day this Saturday, Aug. 3, or remove their outdoor dining setups," Commissioner Ydanis Rodriguez said in a statement.
"Outdoor dining enriches our communities, and we’re excited to make it a permanent feature of New York City streets," Rodriguez's statement added. "Our new outdoor dining program is the largest and best in America, and I encourage all interested restaurants to apply."
Restaurants that don't apply will face fines starting at $500 for the first offense and $1,000 for each violation if they keep their sheds.
Once DOT approves an application, restaurants have 30 days to build structures that meet the new design rules, or by November, whichever comes first.
