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  #1  
Old Posted Mar 1, 2023, 12:34 PM
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Leave Up the Dining Shacks! They saved restaurants, revived street life, and...

Leave Up the Dining Shacks!
They saved restaurants, revived street life, and pointed the way toward a better American city.
By Henry Grabar for Metropolis on slate.com

Quote:
New York City is set to dismantle the one positive legacy of its pandemic years.

I’m talking, of course, about outdoor dining culture, which took over city curbs beginning in June 2020. Initially, these primitive patios symbolized resilience and recovery. They provided a setting for the rebirth of public life at a time when interactions with neighbors consisted primarily of banging pots and pans out the window at sunset. When some pundits claimed that New York would never come back, that plywood meant someone believed in the future. They were a lifeline for the city’s restaurants and their workers during the year when indoor dining was severely restricted, and put eyes on the street when the street was emptier than ever.

And all that was thanks to a mere 8,000 of the city’s 3 million curbside parking spaces.

So, why is New York going to tear down its dining shacks? Some people think they look shabby. Others think they provide a habitat for rats. Some say the sheds constitute a “privatization” of public space. How public that space was is up for debate. It was storage space for private automobiles, and to private automobiles it will return—if the City Council goes ahead with a plan to permit curbside eating only in the warmer months of the year.

In the end, the diffuse charms of dining outside have proved no match for the particular grievances of restaurants’ neighbors. The restaurant lobby, already derided as a “special child” for getting this opportunity in the first place, seems to have run out of influence with a civic establishment that is pathologically averse to change. (It has taken nearly three years to come up with a compromise for the “temporary” program created in the spring of 2020.)

What the City Council has planned, according to Streetsblog, is to require restaurants to dismantle their curb structures during the colder months. Sidewalk dining will be permitted year-round.

New York’s hybrid approach is similar to the program in Paris, where restaurants, cafes, and bars are permitted to occupy parking spots between April and October.

But there are some differences. Paris allows only simple, open structures with see-through walls and no roofs. (Design guidelines are here.) These are easier and cheaper to install, and their spareness solves many of the problems with New York’s outdoor dining, including the rats’ nests and the opacity that shields the priciest tables from the hullabaloo of the sidewalk.

These ad hoc dining rooms are made safe and pleasant by Paris’ aggressive approach to bad driving—the speed limit is under 20 mph and enforced by new infrastructure. In New York, the speed limit is 25 mph—but seldom obeyed. That’s one reason the city required bunker-like structures to begin with.

Opponents of New York City’s plan fear that the seasonal restriction will quash the diversity of the Open Restaurants program, as outer-borough and low-priced establishments drop out. And if Paris is any guide, that will indeed happen. There, between 2021 and 2022, the seasonal system cut the number of curb-lane restaurant terraces by two thirds, from 12,000 to 4,000.
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  #2  
Old Posted Mar 1, 2023, 3:34 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is offline
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This is Eric Adams trying to appease to small voting block of people who own cars and park on the street. I literally don't hear anyone else complaining about outdoor dining sheds other than people who own cars and don't have private parking spaces.
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  #3  
Old Posted Mar 1, 2023, 4:05 PM
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The dining sheds should stay year-round, but there should be strict requirements around their upkeep.
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  #4  
Old Posted Mar 1, 2023, 4:30 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford View Post
The dining sheds should stay year-round, but there should be strict requirements around their upkeep.
I agree. The only complaint I have is that some need to be better maintained. But the sheds are better for street vibrancy than parked cars.
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  #5  
Old Posted Mar 1, 2023, 10:45 PM
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Parked cars have a traffic calming effect, and also provide a buffer for pedestrians from traffic. Parallel parking is important for making a street more pedestrian-friendly. On-street parking also reduces the amount of land needed for parking lots and garages.

Using parking space for outdoor dining is good. But if these shacks are enclosed, it's not outdoor dining anymore. If these parking spaces are to be used for dining, then they should remain open air, not enclosed.
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  #6  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 12:33 AM
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I'm going to vote no on this one. They make for bad sight lines and most of them are ugly. Most of the ones in Portland look like some wonky taco stand down in Tijuana. Want outdoor dining, lobby the city to allow rooftop patios.
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  #7  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 1:22 AM
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I understand their utility during Covid but most are indeed ugly and who wants to dine feet away from traffic?
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  #8  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 1:54 AM
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  #9  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 2:03 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post
Parked cars have a traffic calming effect, and also provide a buffer for pedestrians from traffic. Parallel parking is important for making a street more pedestrian-friendly. On-street parking also reduces the amount of land needed for parking lots and garages.

Using parking space for outdoor dining is good. But if these shacks are enclosed, it's not outdoor dining anymore. If these parking spaces are to be used for dining, then they should remain open air, not enclosed.

I don't see how having a dining area between the sidewalk and traffic lanes would provide less of a buffer for pedestrians than parked cars would. In both cases there's an intermediate buffer space. Besides, the streets I've seen where this was happened still had some parking spaces. A few here and there just happened to be used for dining in front of some restaurants. And let's not forget that on street parking also has its downsides. Studies show that they're responsible for a lot of congestion in the form of people driving around looking for spaces and/or getting in and out of them. So a reduction in on-street spaces - especially such a small reduction - shouldn't be seen as negative.

I also don't see any point in nitpicking about what is or isn't outdoors. It would be like someone saying that camping is supposed to be about sleeping out in nature and you're not really doing that if you're in a tent since that's technically a structure. It's clearly a different experience compared to normal dining and one that some people seem to enjoy.

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Originally Posted by pdxtex View Post
I'm going to vote no on this one. They make for bad sight lines and most of them are ugly. Most of the ones in Portland look like some wonky taco stand down in Tijuana. Want outdoor dining, lobby the city to allow rooftop patios.
Rooftop patios are nice but they're a different experience than street level. There's not the same vibrance and feeling of being part of the activity that you get from being on the street. Besides, a lot of restaurants won't necessarily have access to the roof since they're just renting the ground floor of a building, while other places would need an expensive renovation since the roof may not have stair access. Seems like if it were a reasonable alternative for many establishments they would have just done that during covid.

Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc View Post
I understand their utility during Covid but most are indeed ugly and who wants to dine feet away from traffic?
If no one wants to use them wouldn't the restaurants take them down voluntarily? If they continue to be used it seems like people must like them.
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  #10  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 3:30 AM
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I’m not from New York City but I don’t think customers want to eat outside in between November and March.
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  #11  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 3:54 AM
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I kind of support these, but I don't see how they are safe.
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  #12  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 4:08 AM
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Some are done okay but I don’t think they look all that nice for the most part. Maybe if they were made into permanent structures and shared similar architecture with the surrounding streetscape. Most just look like Home Depot weekend DIY projects. And yeah dining inches away from traffic is pretty unpleasant. I’d much rather opt for a back patio if the restaurant has one. Regardless, I think most people are comfortable with indoor dining again so I'm guessing restaurants will get rid of them once they reach the end of their usable life span or get vandalized beyond reasonable repair.




Last edited by homebucket; Mar 2, 2023 at 4:35 AM.
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  #13  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 4:29 AM
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This example is pretty poorly done, but even okay ones are still kinda meh. It just doesn't fit the character of the neighborhood.

Something like this would be better where there's a buffer between the cars, and seems more thought out rather than an after thought. Or this where at least the colorway matches.
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  #14  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 4:44 AM
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Houston has dining shacks like what homebucket posted on its downtown Main Street because Main has light rail on it and parts of it are closed to cars.
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  #15  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 5:18 AM
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^ which restaurants on Main have those? I never noticed them lately.

Quote:
Originally Posted by homebucket View Post
This example is pretty poorly done, but even okay ones are still kinda meh. It just doesn't fit the character of the neighborhood.

Something like this would be better where there's a buffer between the cars, and seems more thought out rather than an after thought. Or this where at least the colorway matches.
Yeah SF has a lot of really shitty ones like that example in North Beach. Literally inches from traffic.
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  #16  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 5:42 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc View Post
^ which restaurants on Main have those? I never noticed them lately.



Yeah SF has a lot of really shitty ones like that example in North Beach. Literally inches from traffic.
I remember seeing them. I think they were on Main st. in between Rusk st. and Walker st.
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  #17  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 6:58 AM
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I remember seeing them. I think they were on Main st. in between Rusk st. and Walker st.
Must be Finn Hall.
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  #18  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 7:42 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse View Post
I don't see how having a dining area between the sidewalk and traffic lanes would provide less of a buffer for pedestrians than parked cars would. In both cases there's an intermediate buffer space. Besides, the streets I've seen where this was happened still had some parking spaces. A few here and there just happened to be used for dining in front of some restaurants. And let's not forget that on street parking also has its downsides. Studies show that they're responsible for a lot of congestion in the form of people driving around looking for spaces and/or getting in and out of them. So a reduction in on-street spaces - especially such a small reduction - shouldn't be seen as negative.
I was just responding to another poster's suggestion that parked cars add less or not at all to vibrant streets. I explicitly stated that I think that outdoor dining spaces on the street is a good thing
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse View Post
I also don't see any point in nitpicking about what is or isn't outdoors. It would be like someone saying that camping is supposed to be about sleeping out in nature and you're not really doing that if you're in a tent since that's technically a structure. It's clearly a different experience compared to normal dining and one that some people seem to enjoy.
If you don't see the difference between permanent ramshackle buildings on the streets to temporary camps isolated in the wilderness then I don't know what else to say. You try to twist my words to make it seem like I don't support on street parking spaces being used instead for dining even though I explicitly stated the exact opposite yet somehow I am one who's being nitpicky here.
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  #19  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 3:43 PM
iheartthed iheartthed is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post
Parked cars have a traffic calming effect, and also provide a buffer for pedestrians from traffic.
There are better ways to do that.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post
Parallel parking is important for making a street more pedestrian-friendly. On-street parking also reduces the amount of land needed for parking lots and garages.
The pandemic has opened my eyes to this city allowing cars to occupy too much space rent free. The space to park a car was converted into dining areas to support hundreds of patrons all over the city. It shouldn't be a goal of the city to turn that back into dead space for collecting oil droplets from sitting cars.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Doady View Post
Using parking space for outdoor dining is good. But if these shacks are enclosed, it's not outdoor dining anymore. If these parking spaces are to be used for dining, then they should remain open air, not enclosed.
I don't have an opinion on that. I prefer covered, open air spaces, but I'll leave that decision to whoever is in charge of building and maintaining the particular shed. I also don't think that the city needs to dictate that they should be open air spaces.
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  #20  
Old Posted Mar 2, 2023, 4:14 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by homebucket View Post
but even okay ones are still kinda meh.
I agree. On-street dining is fine, but I'm not buying into the idea that it really enhances city life all that much or "revived street life". Philly went ahead and pushed through regulation on them and most are gone and frankly, it's had no effect on my life.

It really was a thing that arose from the ban on indoor dining due to the pandemic. Going out after quarantining and the lockdowns, made things like that feel novel and more "vibrant" than they actually are imo.
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