West Villagers Sue To Stop Permanent Outdoor Dining Program

WEST VILLAGE, NY — Half a dozen West Village residents have signed up onto a lawsuit trying to block the city's outdoor dining program from becoming permanent, arguing that it has made the neighborhood "downright dangerous."

West Village residents Leslie Clark, Marjorie Dienstag, Robin Felsher, Elizabeth Sabo, Steven Thaler, and Stuart Waldman are among the 22 residents who filed the suit Monday in state court.

Most of their fellow plaintiffs live in Greenwich Village, Hell's Kitchen and the Lower East Side — neighborhoods that, like the West Village, have seen a proliferation of outdoor dining setups through the city's Open Restaurants program.

The pandemic-era program allows eateries to create dining setups on sidewalks and roadways. Popular among diners and credited by restaurateurs with saving their businesses, Open Restaurants may now be made permanent if the city gets its way.

The lawsuit presents a decidedly different picture of the program, which the plaintiffs say has clogged sidewalks, created noise issues and permitted the spread of visually unappealing dining structures.

The West Village residents, many of whom note in the lawsuit that they've lived in the neighborhood for more than three decades, point 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," Felsher stated in the suit. "Pedestrians are imperiled as they have to squeeze by as pedestrians paths are significantly narrowed."

"Petitioner Felsher's neighborhood (West Village) has morphed into a makeshift camp of roadbed dining sheds with impassable sidewalks an ambient noise floor that is as loud as a lawnmower," the lawsuit continues.

Felsher wasn't the only West Village resident to bring up the increase in noise from the outdoor dining sheds.

Dienstag and her husband have lived in the West Village Houses on Washington Street since 1983. The couple has a 17-year-old son with autism who is "daily challenged by sensory issues regarding smell, texture, and noise."

The suit states that the increase in outdoor dining has added to the 17-year-old's trouble with noise as it has substantially increased his exposure to uncontrollable noise outside of the apartment.

"When he is exposed to such situations, he puts his fingers as deep as he can in his ears," the suit reads. "For him, confronting this much noise is like being on a battlefield. "When the noise overwhelms him, he becomes upset; several times each week, he calls the police on his own cell phone to ask for help."

The new lawsuit centers around the environmental review that the city conducted as part of the permanent Open Restaurants application, which found that the program would have no significant adverse effect on the environment. That "negative declaration," the residents argue, failed to take into account neighbors' complaints like those contained in the lawsuit.

The city did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the lawsuit.

The suit comes on the heels of a series of contentious community board meetings where furious neighbors have lambasted the program, holding signs reading "Outdoor Dining Destroys Our Peace" and lamenting the noise and vermin that followed the sheds.

Supporters of the program have suggested that those meeting attendees are simply a "vocal minority," and expressed alarm about the possibility that residents could kill a largely popular program that served as a lifeline to local businesses.

Ultimately, community boards have no power to stop the program, though their recommendations can be influential. Once each board has weighed in, the "Permanent Open Restaurant program" will head to the borough presidents, and later to the City Council, to be ratified.

The current emergency program would last until 2023, when the new, permanent program would take effect.

Patch reporter Nick Garber contributed to this report.