Farewell to Most Street Dining Sheds, Numbers to Plunge Nearly 75%

The city’s outdoor dining program is set to massively shrink, at least compared to its peak, after the DOT received only 3,000 applications for formal street dining shed licenses by an August 3 deadline.

In a 2022 study conducted by NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, authors Dominic T. Sonkowsky and Mitchell L. Moss found that roughly 12,500 dining sheds were strewn throughout NYC at that time. The DOT cannot confirm or deny those numbers, with a source saying that they’d only collected a rough “estimate” of existing dining sheds before August, which will clearly change now that they have formal application figures.

Owners that failed to apply for a new street shed license by the deadline, and who fail to take down their sheds, will face fines of at between $500 and $1,000–depending on the number of offenses. Most restaurants that chose to forgo an application are likely to take down their sheds to avoid penalties.

Specifically, 2,592 restaurants submitted a total of 3,226 license applications as of August 4, the DOT told Straus News. Of those, 1,227 of those were for sidewalk-only sheds, with 681 for roadway-only sheds. Separate applications for 632 were for both sidewalk and roadway sheds. Licenses will be valid for four years.

The program, which is now known as Dining Out NYC, has differing rules and regulations for sidewalks and roadway sheds. As of now, sidewalk sheds can stay up year-round, while roadway sheds are seasonal and can only stay up from April 1 to November 29.

Outside of the various forms–taxes, insurance, pest control–that restaurant owners had to submit during the application process, they also had to pay various fees and ensure that the sheds fit certain measurements. An application fee of $1,050 was collected for each type of shed, with a total of of $2,100 if restaurant owners were applying for both. There was also a $1,000 public hearing fee and security deposit fees: $1,500 for a sidewalk shed, and $2,500 for a roadway shed.

The new application deadline similarly came with a host of regulations that dining sheds must now follow. Roadway cafés must provide a “clear path” for pedestrians, for example, and must not be placed in authorized travel lanes or parking areas. Sidewalk sheds must follow similar rules, and restaurant owners who applied for those obviously won’t have to deal with the parking nuances of roadway facilities. Meanwhile, the sheds will have new designs, informed in part by alterations such as replacing sand barriers with water ones (rats can burrow into sand). These designs are expected to cost thousands of dollars, which will add to the costs restaurant owners must contend with.

Some restaurant owners have cried foul on the deadline and its attendant rules, with Hellgate reporting that some small businesses found the new formal program to be “hell.”

Not all people will be sad about the decline in sheds, however. Members of the community group CUEUP (Coalition United for Equitable Urban Policy), which have fervently opposed outdoor dining sheds, told Straus News that they were happy to hear about the looming reduction in sheds.

Leif Artzen, who lives on Cornelia St. in Greenwich Village and is affiliated with CUEUP, claimed that sheds that have come down in the past were “replaced by quieter cleaner norms and community relief. I don’t see anyone getting up to defend restaurant owners, or their favorite shed...if anything, we’re all hoping the last few will quickly (and quietly) disappear.”

Leslie Clark, who noted that she was speaking on behalf of CUEUP, similarly told Straus that dining sheds “shouldn’t be in the road.” The more of them that come down, she added, “the better.” She noted that CUEUP was still in court to try to force an environmental impact study of the program.