WHY NINE IN TEN DINING SHEDS QUIT BEFORE THE CITY LET THEM STAY ALL WINTER

On Aug. 31 Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed Intro 655-A, the first bill-signing ceremony of his term, and the roadway dining shed became a year-round fixture again. For two winters the rule had been the opposite: everything out of the street by the end of November, nothing back until April 1, the whole thing rebuilt at the restaurant's expense. The sheds the law was written for had mostly already quit. At the peak, by the count the Commission on Government Efficiency gave Streetsblog, the city had about 11,770 active outdoor setups. On Aug. 13, the day the Council voted, 1,649 restaurants held fully issued outdoor dining licenses. That is 86 percent gone, nearly nine in ten, before the city said yes. The reason is money, and the money is on paper.

Intro 655-A, by Council Member Lincoln Restler, removes the seasonal limit on roadway cafes, lets operators weatherproof and winterize them, and makes 11 p.m. the hard stop for service, down from midnight. Three companion bills passed the same day: Gale Brewer's lets sidewalk cafes hang removable coverings from Nov. 30 through March 31, Shanel Thomas-Henry's lets the annual fee be paid quarterly, and Justin Sanchez's sets $200 and $500 fines for setups left with trash or vermin. The old season, in the Council's words, ran April 1 through Nov. 29; the mayor's office describes the same calendar as a removal period from Nov. 30 to March 31. A shed still standing past the deadline faced fines of up to $1,000, per Time Out.

What the signing didn't do is write the rules. DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn said the agency would "promulgate rules in the coming months" for winterized setups. DOT's Dining Out NYC site now says applications are open, with a year-round license at higher fees and an upgrade fee for restaurants already in. The proposed rule itself, certified Oct. 6, is out for comment. It creates a year-round roadway cafe that can operate between Nov. 30 and March 31, a one-year interim license for an existing roadway cafe that wants to convert, and vertical winter coverings on all sides from Nov. 30 to March 31, as long as they're retractable, non-rigid and transparent. The public hearing is Nov. 9 at 10 a.m., by Zoom, with written comments due the same day. The removal clause for seasonal cafes stays in the rule. So a shed that wants to stay past the end of November this year is working off a proposal that gets its hearing a week from now, with the old deadline three weeks after that.

Here is the schedule in the proposed rule. The license to run a cafe is $1,050 to grant and $1,050 to renew. The interim license that turns an existing roadway cafe into a year-round one is $630 at issue and $630 at each renewal, on top of the license fee. Then the curb itself, charged per square foot per year by sector: $6 in Sector 1, $10 in Sector 2, $18 in Sector 3 and $31 in Sector 4 for a year-round roadway cafe. A seasonal one pays $5, $8, $14 and $25. The largest permitted roadway cafe is 8 by 40 feet, 320 square feet. In Sector 4 that is $9,920 a year, about $27 a day, the nearly $10,000 Streetsblog reported in August. Add the $1,050 license and, for a converted shed, the $630 pass.

Now the thing the shed displaces. Streetsblog put metered parking in Midtown and Lower Manhattan at nearly $70 for one car for eight hours. A shed in the same curb lane pays about $27 for 24 hours and employs people. Andrew Rigie of the Hospitality Alliance aimed his August complaint at the payment schedule: "Not even a landlord requires a restaurant to pay their full-year rent upfront." Thomas-Henry's bill fixes that with quarterly installments, and the proposed rule adds a catch: miss two in one term and you pay the rest up front.

The counts, in order. At the pandemic peak, Streetsblog's August report, citing the Commission on Government Efficiency, counted about 11,770 active outdoor setups. In November 2025, DOT told the Council that about 400 restaurants had fully completed applications, 300 roadway and 100 sidewalk, while about 2,600 operated on conditional approval and 4,100 applications sat in the queue. On April 9, 2026, a DOT spokesperson told West Side Spirit that 500 roadway setups were operating this spring, roughly matching last year, alongside 1,300 sidewalk setups. On Aug. 13 the Council's release put fully issued licenses at 1,649. Restler's own number for roadway dining is a 90 percent drop in participation.

The cover's "nearly nine in ten" is 11,770 setups against 1,649 licensed restaurants: 86 percent. Setups and restaurants aren't the same unit, since one restaurant can run a sidewalk cafe and a roadway cafe at once, so the share of restaurants gone is a little lower than the share of setups gone. On roadway alone the gap is wider: about 500 sheds this season against thousands at the peak.

At the November 2025 hearing, DOT Deputy Commissioner Margaret Forgione told the Council that two-thirds of the restaurants operating outdoors during Covid were still in the program. At the same hearing Restler said two-thirds of the restaurants that had applied before no longer applied because of the costs. Both can be true, because they start from different lines. DOT's number for the pandemic is 6,000 outdoor dining establishments at its high points. Two-thirds of 6,000 is 4,000, about where the 2,600 conditional approvals plus the 400 full ones landed. Restler's number is 13,100 restaurants that applied for space at the peak. Two-thirds of 13,100 gone leaves about 4,400, also about where things landed. The agency counts who was serving on the curb at a given moment; the Council member counts who ever asked. Pick the starting line and you pick the headline.

Neither side disputes the direction, or the reason Restler's constituents gave him: building, tearing down and storing a shed every year cost more than most of them could carry. Speaker Julie Menin, a former restaurant owner, called the old program too heavy a lift for operators. On the other side of the ledger the Council put the 2020 figures Comptroller Brad Lander's office cited: 11,720 jobs and $373 million in wages.

Sam Goetz owns Judy's at 4022 Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, a coffee shop by day and a natural-wine bar at night, with outdoor seats out front. When the Council bill moved he told Streetsblog the news was fantastic, because the seasonal calendar had been the single biggest reason businesses stayed out of the program. His point was storage. A seasonal shed has to go somewhere from December to March, and most small businesses, he said, have nowhere to put one. He added that some customers want to sit outside even in the cold.

Book Club Bar, the bookstore and bar Erin Neary and Nat Esten run at 197 East Third Street in the East Village, solved the storage problem by renting it. In April 2025 Neary told EV Grieve the bar leases a modified shipping container with four tables and eight seats for $750 a month, on top of the city's permit and license fees. The rental company sets it up, takes it away, repairs it over the winter and stores it in New Jersey. That is $9,000 a year in rent for eight seats before the city sees a dollar, and Neary said it beat the wooden structure they'd built in earlier years. Put the two together and you have the full cost of a seasonal shed: the structure, the labor to build and strike it, the storage, then the curb fee and the license. Year-round operation deletes the strike, the storage and the rebuild. It doesn't touch the curb fee, and under the proposed rule it adds $630 for the pass.

So the answer to the cover: nine in ten quit because for two winters the city charged a shed as much as $10,000 a year for the curb and then made it leave the curb for four months, with a fine waiting if it was late. The law signed Aug. 31 fixes the leaving. The fee stays, the pass is extra, and the rules that decide what a winter shed can look like get their hearing on Nov. 9, three weeks before the old deadline. The restaurants still in are the ones that could afford to bet on the city two years running. The ones that left were right on the math at the time. Rats or dinner outside in February is the argument on the sidewalk. The argument in the rulebook is whether a curb lane is worth more at $27 a day from a restaurant or $70 a day from a car, and the city has already answered that one on paper. It took two winters and nine in ten sheds to get there.

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