PANDEMIC ARCHITECTURE

For a brief, unprecedented period in contemporary New York City history, the rules governing how the city is built loosened their grip. In this urgent window of deregulation, conceived to minimize the spread of COVID-19, permits were simplified, official oversight softened, and the building code, that invisible force shaping how the city behaves, receded from daily life. These changes had an unintended consequence: owning a restaurant became a provisional license to become an architect. In the span of months, more than 12,000 restaurants across the five boroughs participated in the city’s Open Restaurants program, with many building their own sheds, tents, and curbside enclosures. They ranged from the camp to the grotesque and, in a few cases, the unexpectedly elegant. The interiors of places pedestrians might never have patronized were turned inside out. Owners’ personalities, tastes, fantasies, and construction skills were suddenly on display in a return to old-school punk, DIY values. It was a democracy of building the city had not seen in modern memory.

In June 2020, as the pandemic shutdowns threatened to erase much of New York City’s restaurant and bar life, graphic designer Penny Hardy photographed what was then unimaginable in the West Village: two men drinking on the sidewalk during happy hour, seated inside a gazebo-style camping tent, the kind a family of four might take on a weekend trip to the woods. This one stood outside Julius’, one of the city’s oldest gay bars. Another structure caught her eye: a thatched tiki roof sheltering white café chairs and gauzy curtains, as if the sidewalk had been converted into a beach resort. She snapped another picture of a vinyl booth crowned with a plastic diadem, the de facto sidewalk throne of the Cannoli King. She was hooked. What started as a casual practice became a multiyear record of the city’s streetscape in a time of uncertainty. “I had never seen New York like that before,” she says. “All of the rules were gone.” These transformations reminded Hardy of the more permissive New York she knew as a child. Hardy’s ideas about public space were shaped by her father, Hugh Hardy, an architect renowned for designing and revitalizing theaters across the city, including the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Joyce Theater, and Radio City Music Hall. “I grew up on Charles Street in the late 70s. Some mornings I remember my father taking me to breakfast at a diner on West Fourth Street — he in his Brooks Brothers suit on his way to the office, me in my school uniform. Ladies of the night — trans women — flamboyantly dressed in fishnet bodysuits, pink metallic vests, and feather boas sat in the booths next to us. They were ending their day, eating breakfast before heading home to bed. We were starting ours. Everyone said hello.”

Years later, both her work and her personal life remained happily entangled with the built environment. After earning her MFA in graphic design at Yale, Hardy founded her own studio, PS New York, which has specialized in visual identity and branding for clients including Steven Harris Architects, Architectonica, and Compass for more than two decades. The studio also works with preservation organizations such as Village Preservation and Open House New York, which each shape how the city is maintained, sold, and perceived. Through her work, Hardy became more familiar with the city’s invisible machinery: storefront regulations, signage codes, facade limits, and what could extend into the sidewalk and what could not. Over time, as the cost of living in Manhattan increased, the street seemed to lose the energy and creative risk she had grown up with. “Everything now feels stifled by regulation and lack of economic diversity,” she says. Then the pandemic arrived. In a state of emergency, many of the rules she had spent a lifetime understanding were abruptly lifted or relaxed. Indoor dining was shut down, and restaurants were told the only way to operate was outdoors. In most cases, there was no clear model, nor did businesses have excess budgets for elegance. A mass experiment spread block by block across the city: the sidewalk became a construction site, the curb a dining room. The street, long one of the most tightly controlled spaces in New York, became the Wild West.

Mayor Bill de Blasio announced outdoor dining on June 18, 2020, and the Department of Transportation rules that followed were both permissive and exacting. Structures could extend onto the sidewalk and curbside roadway directly in front of a restaurant, but only within the width of the business itself. 8 feet of sidewalk had to remain clear for pedestrians. Barriers filled with sand or soil were required between diners and traffic, along with reflective tape and snow wands to prevent plows from tearing the sheds apart in winter. Fire hydrants, trees, street signs, and even the last remaining telephone booths had to stay visible and untouched. The city supplied heavy, water-filled Jersey barriers for protection. Though this system seemed precise, few of the structures Hardy photographed followed these guidelines, and enforcement was minimal. With the regulatory door cracked open, everything was left to trial and error.

Within weeks, folding tables and pop-up tents appeared, followed by plastic bubble pods. Then came winter, with the rise of plywood sheds with Plexiglas windows and heaters. At first, these structures were purely functional and often bleak-looking. But as the shutdown stretched from weeks into months, and months into seasons, these enclosures began to evolve. The camping tent outside Julius’ multiplied by three or four, all lined up in a row along the sidewalk, equal parts absurd and practical. Many restaurant owners became something like set designers, charged with inventing venues for a new kind of street performance. Diners became both actors and audience, watching the stream of city life pass by from the curb even as they were implicated in it; framed by plywood, vinyl curtains, plastic walls, and white string lights, their meals turned into a show for everyone moving down the sidewalk. The gaze moved constantly between inside and out, between private ritual and public exposure.

As a designer, Hardy was first drawn to the vernacular language of these ad hoc structures. There were suburban sheds with Home Depot sconces and picket fencing, sidewalk living rooms furnished with televisions and curtains, and fantasies of country clubs or seasides staged with AstroTurf and striped umbrellas. Others were brutally minimal: raw plywood, 2-by-4s, striped paint, the least material required to remain standing. In some cases, these structures started to absorb the fabric of the city itself, with mailboxes built into walls and traffic signs intruding into dining rooms. Seen together, many of the dining sheds read as psychological self-portraits under pressure. In standardized architecture, budgets, committees, and zoning requirements would have smoothed away eccentric impulses. During COVID, those design instincts could remain unfiltered. “It really showed people’s personalities,” Hardy says. “What they thought was appealing. What they thought would work.” These structures were also economic lifelines. Many restaurants had tiny interiors. Overnight, the street allowed them to triple or quadruple their capacity. Even Michelin-star dining rooms dragged their tables onto the sidewalk. Private luxury became abruptly public. Divisions of access, class, and visibility collapsed at the outdoor table. Not everyone experienced this democratization of the visual environment as a victory. At best, the designs were inventive and charming; at worst, inadequate or kitsch. If the temporary structures were of universal benefit, it may have been only to the city’s rats.

For Hardy, this work is as much an emotional, political, and personal pursuit as an exercise in architectural classification. She photographed out of fear, boredom, humor, and disbelief. She noticed air conditioners shoved into plywood boxes, illegal wiring, and heating rigs that looked like fire hazards. “Some of it was funny,” she says. “Some of it was kind of terrifying.” It reaffirmed what she has always loved about New York: “When things are not good, people come together.” The pandemic briefly returned her to an older version of the city before global capital reorganized the social map of downtown, a city where labor was visible, class was mixed, and different lives brushed up against one another without being siloed into private realms. In these dining pavilions, the old choreography returned. The street became a shared room.

Of course, the leveling of the social order did not last. As the city formalized its outdoor dining program, only wealthier restaurants could afford seasonal teardown, storage, and reinstallation. But some of what these experiments made possible remains. Jackson Heights’ 34th Avenue is now a permanent open street, giving residents a rare, car-free corridor in outer-borough New York. And on the eastern end of Canal Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, in the area widely nicknamed Dimes Square, cars are barred each evening in spring and summer. By midafternoon, the block transforms into a festive open-air social space, a haven of European-style alfresco café culture. Today, only about 2,000 restaurants have applied to renew their outdoor dining permits for 2026. The street performance has largely ended, and the memory of that all-encompassing moment has begun to fade. This book preserves it. It documents the intermission when New York paused its long run as a luxury city and, under pressure, improvised a new set of civic stages in public view. Through Hardy’s lens, these provisional structures transform beyond their function as emergency shelters. She sees them for what they really are: the material evidence of a brief, sanctioned experiment that showed how much street life the city was willing to let back into view.