Beginning with the de Blasio decrees regarding Covid and outdoor dining—a mediocre, overpriced Snack Taverna on the corner of Bedford & Morton Streets in Manhattan’s West Village began to aggressively exploit the neighborhood’s public space. It first set up tables obstructing sidewalks adjacent to the main thoroughfare: Seventh Avenue South. When authorities objected, the restaurant erected a road shed on Morton Street (between Hudson & Bedford Sts.), which is a ten-foot-wide lane really that historically had always been a residential block.
Indeed, through the centuries Morton Street has been the home of poets such as Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky and countless other writers and artists who have thrived living there peacefully among the trees and flowers.
A sizable chunk of the taverna shed’s metal roof blew off onto the road one month ago, a little after midnight during a storm. The Department of Transportation soon removed the entire moldy, dilapidated, hazardous structure that had plagued the neighborhood for years hosting both drunken crowds and the raving-mad homeless.
The neighborhood rejoiced at the demolition. Finally essential services—fire trucks, ambulances, school buses, police cars, sanitation trucks—could once again move unrestricted to their destinations.
However, following demolition of the shed, the taverna recklessly tossed onto & along the Morton Street sidewalk glass tables with long metal legs sticking up in the air, chairs and other paraphernalia. The Morton Street sidewalk at points measures less than three-feet wide and is precariously tilted near the corner of Bedford & Morton. A motorbike belonging to restaurant personnel also obstructs the narrow sidewalk much of the day and night.
The chairs are now gone but despite complaints to DOT and other authorities, the glass tables remain, endangering the public. Anyone could crash into the tables and get cut or speared. The disabled, in particular, cannot safely navigate the sidewalk—especially those in wheelchairs. Thus, the restaurant is in violation of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).
Astonishingly, the taverna has no plans for the glass tables—metal legs up—that now imperil the lives of pedestrians, yet it refuses to remove them, giving as an excuse: limited basement space. Such ongoing willful public endangerment merits a shutdown of said taverna until it removes the hazardous storage and makes itself ADA compliant.
OSCILLATIONS 