Around the City and on One Tribeca Block: The Battle Over Open Streets

Duane Street, closed to vehicular traffic as part of the city's Open Streets program. It is the only Open Street in Tribeca. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

A single block of Duane Street, between Hudson Street and West Broadway, is Tribeca’s Covid-era holdout of sorts. It is also a hyperlocal view into what now is a city-wide controversy over the proposed “exclusive” use of a roadbed for the patrons of a business.

The Open Street, as the city calls it, is fenced off to traffic for part of the day by the Brazillian restaurant Casa, 157 Duane St., which provides some tables and chairs for its customers, and others for the public. 

The city created the Open Streets program in April 2020 to allow safe social distancing at outdoor gatherings. Now it is looking to codify the maximum percentage of roadbed that can be reserved for paying customers only. (Currently, the amount is unspecified.)

“This small rule adjustment will help bring in resources to keep DOT’s Open Street and Plaza clean, well-managed, and welcoming to all,” DOT spokesman Vincent Barone said in a statement, noting that the program “can better support local small businesses while also providing clear paths for pedestrians, ample space for public use, and programming.”

But a slew of objections to the proposal flooded the online public comment page of the Department of Transportation website, calling it “an illegal occupation of our public roads” and a “pro-business land grab.”

Community Board 1 also took a dim view of the proposal when it was taken up last month, stating in a resolution that it is “strongly opposed to the privatization of public space on Open Streets and pedestrian plazas in our district, believing this rule would allow businesses to take a disproportionate amount of land for their own use at the expense of the public.”

Then came Casa owner Jupira Lee, who didn’t expect to face skeptics when, also in April, she appeared, as required, before CB1’s Executive Committee, for comments on her Open Streets application. (The DOT already had approved it.) Lee, a longtime Tribeca resident who had operated Casa for 24 years in the West Village, opened late last year in the space vacated by Khe-Yo, a restaurant that had participated in the Open Streets program. 

(The restaurant puts out a maximum of eight tables seating 16 of its own customers in front of its building, and another four tables with 16 chairs for the public.)  

“If the restaurant was part of the Open Streets program without any issues from the community for three years,” she told the committee, “I didn’t think there was going to be any resistance for me to open.”

The “resistance,” over the course of more than an hour of discussion, seemed as much to do with the board’s general opposition to the free privatization of public space, at no cost to participating businesses, than with Lee’s relatively modest plan for one short street. 

“[The application] doesn’t satisfy for my purposes what open streets are supposed to be in the public benefit and the public realm,” said CB1 Chair Tammy Meltzer.

“You just want to have access to open space where it’s available,” said committee member Justine Cuccia, noting that when a restaurant takes over public space “it just goes against the program.”

“I think there’s all sorts of reasons for us not to like the regulations and not to like the program,” said committee member Jeff Galloway. “But if an applicant comes to us consistent with the regulations and the program, I don’t think we should reject them simply because we don’t like the program.”

In its resolution, CB1 called on Lee to make a number of commitments, including to the use of the restaurant’s bathrooms to the Open Streets public. (She agreed.) But after several weeks of experience with the program, Lee called it “very difficult.” She gets complaints, she said in an interview this week, not because of the issues raised by the community board, “and it’s not about noise, and it’s not about dirt and it’s not about rats because we clean the street. It’s about parking, parking and [people on the block] not being able to come with their cars inside when they want to, you know, load the car and leave.” 

The street is blocked off only when Casa is open, 4 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. on weekdays and earlier for brunch on weekends. Despite signs that say no parking during those times, Lee said, people will park in front of the restaurant anyway, or even remove barricades in front of her business, preventing or limiting seating on the street.

But the Open Street is also helping to revive her business after what she called “the worst winter” followed by a slow March and April that Lee blamed on both tariff news and the weather. “I almost had a nervous breakdown,” she said. 

“Having this option of offering my customers a little bit of al fresco dining,” she added, “it makes such a huge difference to us.”