Earlier this month, fresh off its victory against NYC DOT Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan's plan for 34th Street, the Post set its sights on the latest scourge to strike our city's streets: pop-up cafés. And today the paper continues its war on the "dangerous trend" of letting businesses make a little extra money by putting some extra seats on the street instead of parking spots.
Pop-up's—both the interior restaurants and exterior cafés—may be hot with the critical set and the foodie set (the James Beard Foundation is planning one of their own next month) but the NIMBYs aren't having what their having, it seems.
"The pop-up restaurant trend seems to me to be slickly packaged sedentary raves or street-level glass-front speakeasies—with food," complained NoLIta resident Kim Martin, who first got in with the food-fighting crowd when she worked against the NoLIta Shake Shack. "I used to be part of that scene—[like,] ‘Oh, my God [how cool], it’s a speakeasy!’” she continued (also, she used to work in fashion). But "now that I understand fire codes and certificates of occupancy and stuff like that, you realize, God forbid something happens...Are they really up to code?” (The answer, which the Post refrains from giving, is generally yes).
Beyond their fury that pop-ups like John Fraser's current What Happens When have been able to open with liquor licences (thanks to a long-standing tricks allowing an operator to transfer their license and space without additional hearings) the pop-up pooh-poohers the Post polled are just livid about the pop-up café program that the DOT tested last summer and is expanding this year.
Even though restaurateurs who had the cafés saw serious jumps in business (one reported a 15 percent boost) the neighbors can see right through the scheme. Because clearly these aren't really going to be cafés. No, no, they're obviously going to be nightclubs in the street. "Why would [a restaurant] pay $10,000 for the platform and the cost of personnel to clean and maintain its physical safety if there wasn’t a benefit?” a neighborhood activist pointed out to the paper before claiming that some of the applicants intend to offer table service.
We do sort of agree with the complainers about one thing though. The Housing Works Book Store's plan to put a café in on Crosby Street seems a little misguided. Not because the street is as traffic filled as the neighbors say (the cobblestones actually keep a fair amount of traffic away) but more because, as the de-facto alley for Broadway, Crosby street always has a certain eau de garbage to it.
