What to Know
- The city's implementation of the Open Streets and Open Restaurants initiatives during the course of the ongoing pandemic was so successful, it plans to make them permanent, year-round programs, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday.
- The Open Restaurants program, which rolled out this summer, expands seating options for restaurants on select restaurant corridors citywide by temporarily closing streets to traffic to create outdoor dining space.
- Meanwhile, the Open Streets initiative was successfully introduced late spring. The idea was to provide pedestrians enough room to enjoy the outdoors while adhering to social distancing norms by closing certain streets to traffic.
The city's implementation of the Open Streets and Open Restaurants initiatives during the course of the ongoing pandemic was so successful, it plans to make them permanent, year-round programs, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday.
The Open Restaurants program, which rolled out this summer, expands seating options for restaurants on select restaurant corridors citywide by temporarily closing streets to traffic to create outdoor dining space.
The initiative rolled out in July and initially featured nearly two dozen of New York City's Open Streets will now feature Open Restaurants summer weekends. It expanded since then to feature more streets and restaurants.
The idea behind the initiative was to allow the restaurant industry to open safely outdoors, while indoor dining was prohibited, during the pandemic. Although indoor dining has since rolled out, it has done so at limited capacity, with restaurants still using outdoor space to seat customers.
It is unclear if restaurants will have to follow additional guidelines during the colder months, including whether they need to provide heating lamps.
Meanwhile, the Open Streets initiative was successfully introduced late spring. The idea was to provide pedestrians enough room to enjoy the outdoors while adhering to social distancing norms by closing certain streets to traffic.
"The way we will do it is we are going to focus first on streets in and around our parks. [We are] very concerned about the streets around parks. Often times we are seeing that immediate area getting very crowded," de Blasio said at the time. "Those streets adjacent to parks are an obvious opportunity to open up more space. We are going to work together to figure out how we are going to do that."
De Blasio went on to explain that some other locations will see sidewalks expansion similar to what was done around Rockefeller Center during the winter holidays where the sidewalks space was opened up into the streets a bit more with proper barricades in place for safety.
"Some streets will be more local areas that aren’t necessarily going to be where you have a major attraction like a park but they are places where we can safely open up some space and have it be enforced," he said at the time.
According to de Blasio, the city will focus first on where the need is greatest.
"So many communities that we have already identified have been already hard hit by COVID we want to be particularly sensitive to implementing these kind of steps," de Blasio said at the time, adding that it will be a joint effort between the City Council, working with the police department, transportation department, sanitation department, parks department to figure "out all the right places we can do this, but first priority are the places hardest hit and then of course figuring out where they’ll have the biggest impact where the most people are."
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September 25, 2020 at 11:30PM
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NYC Open Streets, Open Restaurants to Become Permanent, Year-Round Initiatives - NBC New York
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