How Thousands of Restaurants Took Over the Street

A daily mix of stories about cities, city life, and our always evolving neighborhoods and skylines. [Curbed]( MONDAY, OCTOBER 24 street fights [Plywood Gourmet]( How thousands of restaurants speedily, messily, and probably permanently took over the street. Photo: Thomas Prior Long after the shutdown of indoor dining and the advent of socially distanced picnicking; after [takeout cocktails]( and “Cuomo sandwiches”; after to-go-box trash ziggurats and $69 delivery-app veal parms from [Carbone](; after Jersey-barriered roadway cafés and tabletop hand sanitizer and [QR-code menus]( and a wave of [shuttered restaurants](; after the run on PPE, the rush for PPP, 25 percent capacity indoor dining, contact tracers, and Plexiglas; after masking up to pee and unmasking to eat; after vaccines, vaccine mandates, Excelsior Passes, and easily faked screenshots of Excelsior Passes; after a vaccine brawl at Carmine’s and a germ-shedding [Sarah Palin at Elio’s](; after subzero date nights under feeble electric heaters in yurts, igloos, and corporate-branded “winter villages”; after the return of full-capacity indoor dining; after Delta and Omicron, after boosters and the bivalent jab; after mask edicts ended and [return-to-office]( drives began — after New York’s pandemic era faded out — one key vestige of COVID-19 remained right there on the street: the outdoor-dining shed. [Continue reading »]( Want more on city life, real estate, and design? [Subscribe now]( for unlimited access to Curbed and everything New York. [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The Latest [Wet Leaves Are the Enemy of the Suburban Commuter But laser trains could be the solution.]( [Rosalie Genevro Wants to Redesign the City’s Diners and Coffee Shops The outgoing executive director of the Architectural League answers Curbed’s “21 Questions.”]( As told to Diana Budds [You Can Sit on (Some) of the Art at the Horts’ House Everything is always changing in Michael and Susan Hort’s live-in museum in Tribeca.]( By Wendy Goodman [The Last-Ditch Effort to Save the United Order of Tents’ Bed-Stuy Headquarters A bureaucratic hurdle over tax and vacancy laws threatens the survival of this Black history site.]( By Diana Budds [Sag Harbor Worried About Becoming Port Jefferson And a group of residents is suing over an affordable-housing development.]( By Clio Chang [The Watcher in The Watcher Is (Probably) a Trad-Arch Guy They don’t just have strong opinions about your countertops.]( By Diana Budds [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( [Read More From Curbed]( [Sign up for Reread: Real Estate Mania](, a newsletter resurfacing the wildest real-estate stories from the New York archives. Photo: New York Magazine [GET THE NEWSLETTER]( [logo]( [facebook logo]( [instagram logo]( [twitter logo]( [unsubscribe](param=curbed) | [privacy notice]( | [update preferences]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. Was this email forwarded to you? [Sign up now]( to get this newsletter in your inbox. [View this email in your browser.]( You received this email because you have a subscription to New York. Reach the right online audience with us For advertising information on email newsletters, please contact AdOps@nymag.com Vox Media, LLC 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, 12th Floor Washington, DC 20036 Copyright © 2022, All rights reserved