Permanent outdoor dining will a boon for everyone in the city

The pandemic experiment to let restaurants set up shop outdoors was a godsend for thousands of small businesses that collectively define New York — and a healthy jolt to our neighborhoods, which suddenly saw commercial corridors more enlivened with additional human activity. Perfect it was not, but, with refinements, permanent it should be.

Ending a wait lengthened by legislative negotiators, litigation and the protests of caterwauling naysayers and nitpickers, the City Council yesterday reupped open dining for the long haul. New York will be the better for it.

The emergency version of the al-fresco eating program was an on-balance positive, but its downsides were well understood. Plenty of dining sheds were ugly and rickety, or abandoned. Food scraps almost surely attracted rats. The structures created access and mobility challenges, including for people with disabilities. In some cases, nighttime noise was unfair to neighbors — although it’s probably unrealistic for anyone living in New York on a street full of restaurants to expect quiet.

The permanent program refines the recipe. Though sidewalk dining will be allowed year-round, provided restaurants get a proper permit, tables and chairs in the roadbed will only be allowed in the warmer months, from April until November — a restriction that will mean restaurants can’t build and then neglect permanent structures. It’ll be a pain for restaurants to have to break down shelters, store them in the off-months, and roll them out again when the season begins, but the challenge is far from insurmountable.

Nor will restaurants be automatically entitled to their slice of precious public space, free of charge. It’ll cost $1,050 for a permit to set up seating in the roadway. The precedent is important for any private interest claiming that they’re entitled to use the curb gratis (we’re looking at you, automobiles).

Add them up, and the result should be outdoor dining that’s more attractive, more accessible to all, easier to clean and more responsive to the concerns of local communities.

We’ve said before that the city need not have one-size-fits-all rules. If a sleepier neighborhood overwhelmingly resists outdoor dining, that ought to be respected. Still, we worry that the new law’s approval process for sidewalk cafes, which includes the drawing up of formal plans, their submission to the borough president, the local councilmember and to the Community Board — which then has 40 days to conduct a public hearing and recommend modifications, then pass its judgment to the Department of Transportation, which holds a public hearing if the Community Board says no or urges substantial modifications — will be onerous, if not exhausting.

In her seminal work, the most influential urbanist of the 20th century wrote: “The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing.”

By advancing the inimitable role restaurants have in bringing people together and expressing the exuberant, diverse culture of this great metropolis, outdoor dining made New York a better version of itself. Jane Jacobs would approve. Long may it thrive.