Outdoor dining season officially starts in the Big Apple on Tuesday with brand new regulations in place, but one Manhattan lawmaker thinks the season itself should last all year long.
Manhattan Assembly Member Tony Simone said Monday that he wants to change the newly regulated outdoor dining program, which pares down the calendar for when the al fresco setups can operate in the street and combats the use of inferior, unkempt, hastily assembled dining sheds that evolve into eyesores.
Reminding the public of the importance outdoor dining played in keeping Big Apple restaurants surviving during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago, Simone believes that the city and state can forge a way forward to keep outdoor dining all year long without reliving some of the quality of life problems that led to the new regulations passed last year.
“We’re a really amazing city. We have a lot of smart, hard-working people in sanitation, and in the bids, there’s a way of keeping them clean and having outdoor dining all year,” Assemblymember Simone argued on March 31.
Simone stood with supporters outside of the Empire Diner on 22nd Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea and charged that New York’s new outdoor dining rules were backfiring and restricting business opportunity rather that creating it.
“One of the most beautiful things about COVID is the streetscape was alive,” Simone said. “Unfortunately, the city put restrictive rules that make outside street dining too expensive, too many bureaucratic obstacles in the place. And we support small businesses. We want New Yorkers to allow this piece to be alive.”
In response, Simone said he has introduced legislation in Albany that he says would cut through city red tape and enable more businesses to take advantage of outdoor dining.
The legislator argued that the proliferation of outside dining areas also helped create nearly 12,000 jobs, resulting in about $373 million in annual wages, and generated close to $10 million in tax revenue annually. He also noted that restaurants lost between $20,000 and $30,000 they spent on the dining sheds when they were torn down.
Sara Lind, co-executive Director of Open Plans — an advocacy group that focuses on promoting open streets — took the City Council to task for making outdoor dining spaces seasonal, saying it caused financial harm to restaurants and forced many outside dining areas to fall by the wayside.
“The New York City Council drafted this legislation and passed it knowing full well we told them over and over again, all the people here told them over and over again that a seasonal program would kill the program, and they passed the bill,” Lind said.
While Simone’s legislation would not change the rules of what structures can be erected, if passed, it would allow the extra dining space to be permitted on the curb throughout the year.
The Empire Diner, for example, had a permanent outdoor dining space in the street prior to the pandemic, but Simone argued the new seasonal guidelines set up last year restricted it from being set up again this year.
According to Simone’s office, the Empire Diner had a permanent outdoor dining space prior to the pandemic but was ultimately removed due to the seasonal guidelines.
