According to New York Times restaurant critic, Pete Wells, who “loves outdoor dining,” the Big Apple is in the process of another makeover with a “third wave” of Open Restaurants being added to the city’s already bustling streets. 

Nevertheless, as more parking spaces are given over to myriad semi-permanent structures, how this program is enacted will determine who is able to enjoy the public realm. Are restaurant-going people the only New Yorkers that should stand to benefit from this significant shift in urban design?

Open Restaurants and Open Streets were conceived in 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, in which indoor dining was prohibited, allowing restaurants to move their tables outside. The latter was designed to provide additional public space for New Yorkers to socially distance outdoors. Restaurant-going locals have enjoyed the redesign of city streets—however provisional the structures—and now, through regulation, the city has the opportunity to make this a design opportunity to benefit more people.

“Low or sliding fees and simple forms could help outdoor dining put down roots in areas where people have less money and less experience handling bureaucracy. These spaces could be restricted to eating and drinking, or could be opened to cultural, educational, or community pursuits. Business owners could use their streets and sidewalks to welcome their neighbors, or to wall themselves off from them.”

The city has willingly given over revenue-generating parking spaces so that people can eat out, and this has fundamentally changed the quality of life on New York streets. The design of these Open Restaurants has run the gamut from the ad-hoc plywood shed, to verdant, plant-filled greenhouses, to more costly installations designed by architects like GRT Architects. 

Furthermore, some of the restaurants, like Brooklyn-based Peaches Kitchen & Bar, have used the opportunity to install Open Restaurants that “are advertisements for an idea,” says Josh Draper, who created “Friendship Cabins” for the restaurant built from plastic bottles, highlighting the environmental degradation caused by these objects. His design is “an extension” of work for the Center for Architecture, Science and Ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

All this raises the question, if parking spaces are effectively up for grabs, could the city and designers do more? The Regional Planning Association is still accepting entries to the Alfresco Awards for designs that consider the potential of Open Streets and Open Restaurants. Should it be limited to restaurants?

What about New Yorkers who have suffered through this pandemic, for whom enjoyment of restaurants—let alone stable housing—is a distant aspiration? This was the point made by Jeremiah Moss, author of Vanishing New York, when he responded on Twitter to Pete Wells’ headline, “New York Loves Outdoor Dining. Here’s How to Keep the Romance Alive” with the question: “Unless you live on a street, in a neighborhood, full of outdoor dining. Then you might not love it so much.”

Unless you live on a street, in a neighborhood, full of outdoor dining. Then you might not love it so much. https://t.co/9CO6YLbubV
— Jeremiah Moss (@jeremoss) June 29, 2021

This perspective is important, as most coverage of the outdoor dining has focused on the diners themselves, rather than the people who actually live on New York City streets, unhoused people. This was the tone of one of the few articles that addressed this issue last year, “The Ugly Side of New York’s Outdoor Dining Renaissance,” by “Big City” critic, Ginia Bellafante: homeless people are a nuisance to the moneyed outdoor diner.

Nevertheless, Open Restaurants have proven that the city’s bureaucratic priorities can be mobilized to change public space by decentering the car, Moss is correct in pointing out that this program has done little to address the larger inequities in the city. While I’m sympathetic to Moss’ position, a program aimed at providing outdoor dining cannot be a panacea, though it can do better. 

The design opportunity afforded by Open Restaurants allows local architects to prototype their ideas and Draper’s design is typical of the way architectural pavilions function as testing grounds for extra-industrial innovation. They test materials and methods that might be difficult to fund or support within a conventional production environment. Bespoke or not, these types of projects aspire to reproducibility and an economy of scale. 

Using plastic bottles to create shelters for disaster areas would certainly be poetic, as it connects the issue of global warming and sea-level rise to the sad consequence of displacement. But what of displacement here on New York City’s streets? What of the use of Open Restaurants themselves? Is this emblematic of the typical diner's assumed sympathy to environmental issues over the more difficult challenges of homelessness, housing, and the way gentrification affects the use and perceived exclusivity of new public spaces?

Indeed, in the April 2021 issue of the print-only New York Review of Architecture, Kevin Rogan argues that Open Restaurants are effectively appropriating publicly owned land—never mind that the current use of the land is almost exclusively for street parking and garbage collection, as the new structures operate in the street or on sidewalks. The Business Improvement District (BID), what Rogan calls a “property owner’s union,” is reshaping New York’s streetscape, as it draws tax revenue from commercial property and influences urban design.

As the current Open Restaurants turns public space into places only paying customers can use, I would argue that an improved version of the program must allow entities other than restaurants to appropriate this space. In a city where property and business run the show, leveraging this moment when parking spaces are up for grabs, challenging the programming of Open Restaurants will require reframing the debate. Rather than restaurants versus parking, the question should be: If we are willing to give up parking spaces, how can these new streetscapes benefit the maximum number of New Yorkers?

Perhaps this is beyond the aspirations of most New York designers—or of the format afforded by Open Restaurants—but it would be far more radical to create semi-permanent shelters connected to something non-commercial, providing an outdoor space for any New Yorker to use, regardless of their ability to pick up the tab at a restaurant.

Editor's note: This article has been edited on July 7th, 2021.