New York City aims to keep outdoor lifestyle post-virus

NEW YORK » As COVID-19 ravaged New York City, virus-wary denizens locked out of indoor public places poured into the streets, sidewalks and parks. They dined with friends in outdoor sheds hastily erected by restaurants and went to health classes, concerts and even therapy sessions on streets closed to traffic.

Now as the city continues on its path of recovery, the pandemic could be leaving a lasting imprint on how the city uses its roads: More space for people and less room for cars.

Even though indoor dining has resumed in the city — no masks or vaccine cards required — outdoor dining decks, set up in former parking lanes, have never been more plentiful.

Meanwhile, the city is expanding its Open Streets program, which closes roads to vehicles and opens them to pedestrians.

The expansion of the program — originally conceived as a way to give New Yorkers more space to exercise — is partly intended to increase foot traffic along struggling business corridors and give lower-income neighborhoods similar opportunities as higher-profile and wealthier enclaves.

“There have been a lot of closings of things during COVID. There are sections of blocks where there’s lots and lots of empty storefronts, and that’s depressing,” said Maura Harway, who lives in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “So anything that brings people back and helps the businesses and helps the neighborhood to feel alive and lively.”

New York’s streets — once places where kids played stickball — were turned over nearly completely to vehicles in the automobile age, except for the occasional summer street fair.

But for years, some city leaders have sought to “reinvent and repurpose the use of our streets,” said the city’s transportation commissioner, Ydanis Rodriguez, who wants more neighborhood promenades for outdoor gatherings.

“The message to all New Yorkers is that our space is their space — that our streets don’t belong to car owners only,” said the commissioner, who oversees the Open Restaurants and Open Streets programs.

Among the legacies of the pandemic could be the remaking of the city’s food culture by permanently expanding it from the confines of indoor dining to eating en plein air, giving curbsides a bit of Parisian flair.

Before the pandemic, 1,200 establishments had permits to set up tables and chairs on sidewalks. But under the Open Restaurants program, more than 12,000 eateries and bars got permission to extend service into the streets.