The End of COVID-19 Dining
The signs of COVID City are fading. Tattered yellow decals on subway platforms sport a pair of footprints and the admonition to “keep a safe social distance from others,” a phrase that will grow more mysterious with each passing year. Some stores never bothered to take down signs requiring masks for entry. The last redoubts of pandemic architecture, the restaurant sheds made of plywood and two-by-fours that kept hardened New York diners eating out through all but the most frigid weeks, are finally coming down. In their place we’re getting a much smaller flotilla of lightweight canopied cafés that meet new city regulations. The Wild West era of outdoor dining is dead; long live the domesticated version.
Dynamic cities keep tinkering with new ways of making themselves livable. Experimentation is generally a slow and fitful process. (Composting, not exactly a revolutionary concept, has been inching across the boroughs for years.) But the pandemic supercharged cities’ improvisational skills. As it hurtled along, tossing aside normalcy from every aspect of human behavior, officials scrambled to make their bureaucracies adapt. Colored tape, traffic cones, and cans of spray paint became the essential materials of sped-up city planning. Suddenly we were all living in a jury-rigged metropolis. Those adaptations could be comforting: Every Thursday afternoon for months, my wife and I toted a contraband six-pack and a couple of camp chairs to the park to meet two other couples. We arranged ourselves in an equilateral triangle with double points and ten-foot sides, shouting across the divide. But a DIY city can also be dangerous. Around that time, a flimsy sawhorse blocked off an avenue in my neighborhood, turning it into an open street; when the driver of a speeding box truck crashed right through it, I dodged a quick and violent death. In the weeks that followed my near miss, I saw a dozen other vehicles ram the same shattered sawhorse, which nobody ever replaced.
