Over half a decade has passed since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During those challenging times, restaurants ingeniously utilized outdoor dining sheds that spilled onto sidewalks and even into curbside lanes, a strategy that proved vital in sustaining businesses when indoor dining posed significant health risks.
However, circumstances have changed.
Now, it’s time to reconsider the presence of these sheds in the curbside lanes. Contrary to this view, the City Council is proposing a different approach. While the Adams administration mandated the removal of sheds from parking lanes from November through April, the Council is advocating for them to be allowed year-round.
Consider the chaos during recent weeks, as New York faced relentless snowstorms that left the city blanketed in ice. Imagine the added complications had these outdoor sheds remained in place throughout the year.
Their presence complicates street cleaning and hampers effective trash collection. And don’t even mention the challenges they pose for snow removal.
These are just some of the reasons I oppose them. Moreover, their existence raises serious questions of fairness and ethics.
Giving restaurants rent-free space while paying only a modest yearly usage fee on city property is nice for those restaurants, but let’s think about this for a minute — is it fair to everyone else?
Is it fair to the clothing store next door that, to begin with, loses a few convenient parking spaces for potential customers, but also can’t use the property in front to display, for example, a row of dresses?
Is it fair to the restaurant down the block that, due to its design, has the same amount of interior space but a narrower façade on the street and, thus, less available curbside space for outdoor tables?
Is it fair to the restaurant that has no street-facing windows — think of those inside Penn Station or Grand Central Terminal, or within a mall or market, for example — that must now compete with restaurants a few blocks away who’ve been given free space and can, perhaps, bring their prices down a little because of it?
These ethical questions apply to every neighborhood and are reason enough for the Council to not only not allow the sheds to fill curbside spaces during the winter, but to do away with them all together.
But in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, where I am chairman of the local Business Improvement District — and also a longtime small business owner — we have additional reasons.
This goes back to a long-term frustration of mine — City Hall and the Council generally treat every neighborhood the same, with the same priorities and challenges, when we all know that every neighborhood in every borough is its own world unto itself. What works in one place doesn’t work in another.
Parking in Belmont — especially along Arthur Ave., an authentic Little Italy — is our most precious shared resource. Approximately 85% of our customers travel here by car; convenient parking is critical to our business model, one where both retail and hospitality draw visitors from across the region.
We are in a transit desert, far from the nearest subway or Metro-North station.
Eliminating parking spaces for a limited number of additional tables, particularly when sidewalk dining is available, risks undermining that balance.
Maybe fighting the Council is a lost cause. So I’m trying a different tactic. I’m asking our restaurants: please don’t put sheds in the parking lanes and thus inconvenience your customers, as well as those of the retail store next door. Just because you can have sheds up all year doesn’t mean you have to.
Who knows? Maybe camaraderie and neighborliness will succeed where the Council’s blindness to our needs failed.
Madonia, chairman of the Belmont Business Improvement District, is former chief of staff to Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
