May 29, 2020
In any other year the hundreds of outdoors cafes on this island would be filled with Manhattanites doing what we do best: eating out. From Battery Park on up through the Village, Chelsea, Midtown West, the UWS, Harlem, the Heights, and Inwood you could hit two a day and still never visit them all. That’s in any other year.
This year the COVID-19 Pandemic and NYS on Pause coincided with some of the most gorgeous Spring days in memory. And our restaurants have largely been shut down aside from curbside pick ups and home deliveries. Sitting at a restaurant table, even at an outdoors one, with friends has been impossible since mid March.
Nevertheless, declining indicators such as new COVID-19 cases, intubations, and deaths suggest that the end of our restaurant shutdown may be near. And lest a heavily armed III% militia storm City Hall (as they recently did in Michigan) demanding that Tavern on the Green reopen or else, a group of City Council members wrote a letter imploring the Mayor to let New Yorkers get back to the business of eating out.
We don’t yet know how this will work out. Already impromptu stand up speakeasies in front of bars recently allowed to sell cocktails to go have been forming. The ‘to go’ part hasn’t really caught on yet because, well, if you’re at a bar drinking with friends you don’t want to get too far away from the next round, right? The Council members’ proposal asks for more lenient sidewalk cafe regulations, to allow these eateries to deploy tables and chairs on the sidewalk or even in the street itself if it can be closed off to traffic. We’ll choose the al fresco option as soon as it’s available up here – with relish, even.
About an hour’s drive from here you can see our possible future. Connecticut has already partially opened up and folks were out to lunch today in West Hartford. Not only were they enjoying their food and drinks in the open air, they were also able to visit a mattress shop and a picture frame store if they felt like it. It feels extremely odd to envy West Hartford for anything, really, but there it is. Mayor de Blasio, fix this!
