What say ye, NYers?
About time. I have never seen so many rats before all the sheds went up. I never understood why restaurants were now entitled to free use of space public forever. Great maybe for the restaurants and people who didn’t live near them. Not so much for everyone else.
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Were they no longer being used as extra outdoor seating?
In NJ, outdoor dining is now permanent. But most of it is for restaurants that have used their own parking lots or outdoor spaces, while in NYC, they took up sidewalk space (and made getting around for the blind or physically disabled a nightmare) or parking spaces,.leading to cars driving around more looking for parking, or vehicles parking to block the traffic lanes.
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The sheds made sense during the lockdown era when restaurants were first closed then allowed to reopen with reduced seating. Some of the sheds were ridiculous in terms of the original thought and what they became. It was supposed to be outdoor seating where in theory you would minimize risk of exposure to the covid virus. In reality many became fully enclosed adjacent dining rooms with light and heat and no ventilation. I happily dined in them.
But as any semblance of covid restrictions have passed for a while I didn’t see the rationale for providing free space to restaurants. Many of the sheds stopped being used. Especially for the more modest mom and pop owned places. They had plenty of space inside for the level of customers.
It was really the more popular places that had lots of traffic that continued to use the shed to increase the number of diners they could serve. In other words the most profitable restaurants. Oh boo hoo that Balthazar which is one of the most successful restaurants in New York has to figure out how to manage the number of employees they hired assuming that the free space in the shed would be there forever. The sheds were great for the successful operators as they could seat more diners and people who wanted to dine in areas where they were concentrated. It wasn’t good for the people who lived nearby and for the City’s finances. I think the compromise is a good one.
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And there’s the answer. It’s not that NYC is going back to the no outdoor dining rule. The compromise, for those of you not living in NYC, is that the sheds must be registered, licensed, constructed according to regulations, maintained & taken down during winter months. Yes there’s an issue for smaller places that then need to eat these costs & store their sheds, but I think that it’s offset by the increased business during the months of use. And, by the way, these regs are basically not anything that they don’t have to do for their indoor dining.
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That’s more than a little one sided, no? How about the advantage of having an outdoor space to accommodate folks who, for various reasons, would rather dine outdoors? Where sidewalks are not wide & sheds would impede pedestrians, the regs. put the sheds in the street and, indeed, take up parking spaces. And, more often, these sheds add a vibrancy and liveliness to otherwise drab blocks. And, unlike what you might be envisioning, I don’t see an awful lot of NYC restaurant patrons (including myself) thinking that driving up to their dining destination and finding parking is reality based. “If only that shed wasn’t there, I’d be the one to get that parking space” is not a NYC thing.
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I honestly don’t understand why anyone living Manhattan would own a car.
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True, but a lot of NYC is not Manhattan. And lots of Manhattan is above midtown.
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I am aware, which is why I specifically mentioned Manhattan, not NYC. I also wouldn’t want to have a car if I lived in Brooklyn, or high above midtown, tho I guess it comes in handy for peeps in Bronxville 
I still would prefer public transport whenever possible, and walking.
Let’s not forget Staten Island, which is much more car-oriented than the other five boroughs.
Let’s not. But it’s also not Manhattan.
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“…folks who…would rather dine outdoors.”
Mr. R. and I are still not doing indoor restaurant dining. So, when we are in the city (we have an apartment but are mainly in our house in NJ), we only eat out at places that have outdoor dining. Fortunately, there are several within walking distance of the apartment that are favorites we regularly went to pre-pandemic and can happily continue to patronize because they have outdoor seating. Places like Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern have both sidewalk seating and structures in the street that are open to the air and very substantial, i.e., far from a rickety shed! I presume they’ve now been taken down. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, will replace them.
Re: Parking. We drive into the city, park in the garage in our building, and take car service to the few restaurants with outdoor seating we like that are not nearby.
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well said
In our case, to travel outside of the city. We got the car during the pandemic, because we felt uneasy taking Metro North to get to our upstate cabin. We occasionally drive to Brooklyn or Queens if where we’re going is not well-served by the MTA - people who haven’t spent much time here might assume that everywhere one wants to go is within a few blocks of a subway stop, but this is not the case.
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I sold my car when I moved to Berlin. The public transportation system is pretty excellent (although people love to complain about it at length — myself included). It’s also a very walkable city, but for trips to other hoods that are anywhere between 30-45 min away, depending on one’s location and destination, hopping on the subway/train is the way to go. Buses exist, too.
Parking is sparse, though certainly not as sparse as in Manhattan and (possibly) other boroughs, so car sharing is YUGE. The number of car shares I see grow every year.
And on the occasion of trips outside of the city, we have a wonderful train system, too. Or I can always rent/share a car… owning one simply doesn’t make any sense, though plenty of Berliners do
It’s cheaper to own. Rental cars are $100/day in the city, somewhat cheaper outside, but you have to get to them. And after a while, lugging clothes/cat/food around on the subway gets kinda old.
Even if the U.S. had a wonderful train system, which it most certainly does not, that’s not always the best way to take a road trip. Bringing along your tent and sleeping bag would be an issue.
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Wow. Yeah, car sharing fees are much lower than that. You can rent a car for dirt cheap just for a day and leave it wherever. It’s a pretty excellent system.
I don’t camp EVER, so no need for packing tents or sleeping bags. That said, a fan would’ve come in handy when we were stuck in the middle of BFN between Berlin & Cologne during one of those lovely days over 100˚F without air conditioning for an hour.
I managed without a car for my first 35 years in the city, but it really does make many things a lot easier. We’re thinking of joining Costco!
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Oh, hellz to the yeah. We got a cheapo Sam’s membership for a year for… renting a car bahahaha, and buying those amounts def requires automotive transportation.
Not sure we’ll renew, however.
