Opinion: Dining in the gutter — is it really here to stay?

BY LESLIE CLARK | The unsightly, unsanitary tangle of street sheds called “Outdoor Dining” may be here to stay if Mayor Adams has his way. The spectacle of New York’s fine avenues, historic streets and unique neighborhoods reduced to a clutter of gutter dining sheds is an embarrassment to our once-great city. But our mayor wants it and he is asking our City Council to rubber stamp legislation [written at his “request”] that dutifully serves the interests of lobbyists who have grabbed Adams’s attention and are hanging on to his power.

The legislation is called Intro 31C — a perpetual extension of the pandemic Open Restaurants program — and it bears the clear markings of political insiders, special-interest and industry lobbyists, who have been pushing this program down residents’ throats for three years now. And they’re crowing about it.

Open Plans co-director Sara Lind thanked all those who worked “diligently behind the scenes.” Keith Powers, the City Council Democratic majority leader, spoke of “months of tricky discussions.” Hospitality Alliance chief Andrew Rigie bragged about “two years of discussions and negotiations with the mayor’s administration and the City Council” led by Rigie’s chief legal counsel.

“Working diligently behind the scenes”…“tricky discussions”…“two years of negotiations with the mayor” — that’s what used to be called backroom deals. Those deals cut neighborhood residents out of the process at every turn. There were no public hearings on the legislation. No public roundtables, as promised by the Department of Transportation more than a year ago. No environmental impact study, as required by state law. Just private meetings and deals with an industry that calls itself “hospitality” and stands to make a fortune from this program — and with “new urbanists” determined to replace cars on the city’s streets, whatever the cost in rats, trash, noise and public safety.

The result of these exclusive backroom deals? An “anywhere everywhere” piece of legislation that would allow any restaurant to open a sidewalk or roadway cafe anywhere and, therefore, everywhere. And no limits on how many outdoor dining setups can be on any block. No distinction drawn between commercial corridors and small residential side streets where people live and once tried to sleep at night.

Forget about sleeping when this legislation passes. Intro 31C contains no sound mitigation at all, nothing to prevent loudspeakers and televisions in the sidewalk cafes or roadway setups. And the noise will invade neighboring homes from 10 a.m. to midnight — by decree of this legislation. That’s 14 hours out of every 24-hour day. Who cares if kids, elders and working people can’t get a good night’s sleep? Not industry lobbyists and not our mayor.

City councilmembers like to assure constituents that there will no longer be sheds in the new program. They’re wrong. Intro 31C speaks of “readily removable tables, chairs and other removable decorative items” in the roadway that will be surrounded by “barriers.” Add a platform and a roof — neither of which are banned by this legislation — and you’ve got what most experienced New Yorkers would call a “shed.”

Intro-31C does say that roadway dining will be “seasonal,” though that is bizarrely defined as most of the year, or eight months — from April 1 to Nov. 30. So, will these new-fangled sheds be dismantled and stored every night during those eight months? Or just on Dec. 1 of every year, in order to give our filthy, stinking streets a once-a-year cleaning by the Sanitation Department’s water-and-brush trucks? Or will the sheds just be padlocked and left to fester in the gutter for four months out of every year?

And what will the cost be to the newly franchised outdoor restaurateur? Intro 31C licenses public space to private business interests for as little as $5 per square foot per year. Yes, that’s right — less than the price of a latte. And the bill mandates that 80 percent of all sidewalk and roadway space in the program be licensed at the very low end of the scale. The high end? That would be $31 per square foot per year – or the price of a single [lunch] entrée in Manhattan neighborhoods where pandemic gutter-dining has become endemic.

The Department of Transportation, the same agency that has notoriously bungled the pandemic Open Restaurants program during the last three years, will continue to mismanage its mandate and create rules it will not enforce. And, under Intro 31C, restaurants will be allowed to keep whatever setup they now have sprawled all over the sidewalk or roadway until November 2024. That’s a 15-month extension of temporary Open Restaurants and a clear incentive to the hospitality industry to keep piling up the garbage, feeding the rats and broadcasting the din of its drunken patrons into neighboring homes.

It’s not surprising that the hospitality industry would work hard to craft legislation that perpetually increases its own profits. What is deeply distressing is how progressives, “new urbanists” and “public space advocates” have pushed this public land grab — with apparent indifference to the very public whose interests they claim to represent.

Any city councilmember with a conscience should vote NO on Intro 31C.

Clark is a member, West Village Residents Association and Coalition United for Equitable Urban Policy (CUEUP)