It’s been more than five years since COVID hit. Dining sheds for restaurants that filled the sidewalks and continued into curbside lanes were a great idea at the time, keeping numerous restaurants alive when indoor dining was a health challenge.
But that was then, this is now.
It’s time to remove the sheds from the curbside lanes. But the City Council plans the opposite — whereas the Adams administration required that parking lane sheds be removed from November to April, the Council wants to allow sheds in parking lanes all year ’round.
Where were they the last few weeks, when New York got buried in snow that froze and refused to go away? Can you imagine how much worse it would have been with year-round outdoor sheds everywhere?
It’s a disaster for street cleaning and trash collection. Don’t even get me started about snow removal.
So that’s one reason I’m against them. But there’s another: They are deeply, unquestionably, ethically unfair.
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.
