'Rats Forever:' West Village To March Against Outdoor Dining

WEST VILLAGE, NY — West Villagers will rally this weekend to protest efforts to make permanent the Open Restaurants program they say has "made lives miserable for the tens of thousands who live on shed-filled streets."

The Chuck The Sheds march will kick off noon Saturday from Father Demo Square at Bleecker Street and 6th Avenue and make its way to Washington Square Park for a rally, according to the Coalition United for Equitable Urban Policy, an alliance of neighborhood and block associations organizing the event.

"Now the city wants to make the emergency program (Open Restaurants) — and our misery — permanent," reads a poster for the brunch hour march in Lower Manhattan. "Noise forever. Rats forever. Trash forever. Traffic forever. Impassable streets forever. Lives disrupted forever."

The protest comes as the city works on creating a permanent Open Restaurants program — allowing restaurants to use sidewalk and curbside space to set up outdoor dining areas — which would be managed by the NYC Department of Transportation.

Hurdles to a permanent Open Restaurant policy — expected to launch in 2023 — include laws that control outdoor dining in non-emergency situations and, of course, New Yorkers who hate the idea.

"We've outed Permanent Open Restaurants as a program that’s not a public benefit, but a public nuisance, a program that generates intolerable noise, street drunkenness, rat infestations and mounds of trash," Coalition member Stuart Waldman said in a news release.

"It’s time the Mayor and City Council listen to the valid concerns of their constituents about this program.”

The Open Restaurants program was widely considered one of the few positive things to come out of the pandemic, but there has also been a consistently critical group of the sidewalk dining initiative.

In October 2021, half a dozen West Village residents — along with residents from Greenwich Village, Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side — signed onto a lawsuit trying to block the city's outdoor dining program from becoming permanent.

• Read More: West Villagers Sue To Stop Permanent Outdoor Dining Program

The West Village residents, many of whom the lawsuit noted had lived in the neighborhood for more than three decades, pointed to the dangers of outdoor dining sheds clogging sidewalks and pushing pedestrians into the streets along with the extra noise the expanded seating has brought to the community.

"The West Village has become lawless and sometimes downright dangerous," the lawsuit contended. the suit. "[The neighborhood] has morphed into a makeshift camp of roadbed dining sheds with impassable sidewalks an ambient noise floor that is as loud as a lawnmower."