HOW A LABOR-BASHING, CORPORATE LOBBYIST SNOOKERED NEW YORK POLS
Andrew Rigie is point man for an industry that treats workers like kitchen scraps. Out of 169 U.S. industries, hospitality is 167 in wages paid. As head of The New York City Hospitality Alliance, Rigie fought to limit restaurant a workers right to sue, fought paid sick leave, fought two weeks paid vacation, and fought the $15 an hour minimum wage.
While Rigie likes to brand the Hospitality Alliance as a home for the little neighborhood restaurant, its main concerns are elsewhere. The New York City Hospitality Alliance was formed nearly a decade ago when the city’s larger restaurant groups, bars and late-night clubs split from the State Restaurant Association because it was too focused on the needs of smaller restaurants around the state. Today its Board of Directors is dominated by corporate run restaurant groups, big-name restaurants financed by LLCs with deep-pocketed investors, and corporations that supply the hospitality industry.
You would think that in New York, where the City Council is 95% Democratic and the State Legislature has a Democratic super majority, a man like Andrew Rigie would have a hard time gaining traction. But over the last year Rigie has become New York’s most influential lobbyist.
This isn’t a story of dark money. Andrew Rigie doesn’t command a Super Pac, nor does he throw bags of money at favored legislators. This is the story of a crisis, of a city’s economy in free-fall and of panicked officials desperately looking for a quick fix.
In May of last year, Rigie co-wrote an op-ed with City Council speaker Corey Johnson entitled “Reopen New York restaurants with a European Café sensibility.” A month later dinner was being served on sidewalks and in the street. What the city called the Open Restaurants program had become one of the few popular initiatives as New York was slowly emerging from total lockdown. Schools were still closed. Offices were still closed. Theaters were still closed. Museums were barely open. But restaurants were back. It was the first hint that, yes, things would someday return to normal.
Restaurants threw up funky plywood shacks so that they could serve in all kinds of weather. New Yorkers flocked to the dining shacks. Cable news showed New Yorkers flocking to the dining shacks. Newspapers wrote about restaurants that had been saved by the dining shacks. Politicians climbed all over each other to take credit for the dining shacks. In that strange, unreal summer of 2020, the hospitality industry suddenly seemed the most important business in New York City and Rigie, as its representative, was the go-to guy. It was his fifteen minute moment, and he took it to the bank.
At the end of the summer, the Gothamist ran a long article about the state of the restaurant industry. When they asked Rigie about the future of Open Restaurants once the pandemic was over, he said without hesitation “We should make the program permanent.” That was all the politicians needed. Two weeks later, the Mayor declared that Open Restaurants should be a permanent program. Five days after that, Rigie was the chief witness at a City Council hearing about a bill — written with the input of the Hospitality Alliance — that would mandate the creation of a permanent Open Restaurants program. Two weeks later, the bill passed 46 to 2.
If the Hospitality Alliance had proposed permanent Open Restaurants before the pandemic, Rigie would have come to City Hall with a PowerPoint packed with projections: costs versus benefits, impacts on neighborhoods, impacts on the environment, impacts on the disability community, impacts on emergency services. His proposal would have been studied and analyzed by the appropriate agencies. Recommendations would have been made and afterwards publicly debated. But we were in the middle of one of the greatest emergencies in the city’s history. Panic overruled process. Rigie proposed, the Mayor disposed, and the City Council rubber stamped — all in less than a month, all without public input. That is how you milk a crisis.
Now that the dining shacks have been on our sidewalks and streets for a year, we don’t need projections. The impacts of outdoor dining are all around us — residential neighborhoods overwhelmed by noise, trash and rats, climate impacts of tens of thousands of outdoor electric heaters operating all winter long, people with disabilities forced off the sidewalks as they try and fail to navigate wheelchairs and walkers through a wall of shacks, firefighters trying to do their job while bulky shacks on narrow residential streets slow response times as well as block access fires.
Then there’s the impact that has yet to happen and is the Department of Transportation’s greatest nightmare. Roadway dining is a coy euphemism for eating in a traffic lane. As any body shop can tell you, moving vehicles collide with parked cars all the time. Most are minor sideswipes, but there are also much more serious collisions. There were two such this spring, one in March, the other in April. Only instead of parked cars, the vehicles rammed into dining shacks and obliterated them. Fortunately, both accidents occurred when the shacks were empty, but one can only imagine the carnage if it had been a busy weekend night. Roadway dining is a tragedy waiting to happen.
Despite Rigie’s spin, a permanent Open Restaurant program will not benefit the little neighborhood restaurants he claims to represent. Even the funkiest dining shack can cost upwards of $10,000. Added to that is the cost of heating and maintenance. And when the lease is up, the landlord will ask for a rent hike based on the additional seating in the shack. The only way to justify these not insignificant costs is if outdoor dining will increase business. It will not. By definition neighborhood restaurants have a customer base that’s limited to their neighborhood. A filled dining shack will simply mean less business inside the restaurant. For the majority of New York’s 25,000 eating and drinking establishments, permanent outdoor dining’s costs will outweigh its benefits.
When Andrew Rigie said: “We should make the program permanent,” he was thinking of the restaurants and bars that pay his salary. Permanent Open Restaurants is a program for those establishments that have the financial wherewithal to absorb higher costs and a market that isn’t tied to a specific neighborhood. For these restaurants, the world is their neighborhood: Tourists, office workers, theater-goers, and foodies whose asses will fill seats both outside and inside. For these restaurants, many of whom have doubled their capacity by building extra-large dining shacks, a post-pandemic Open Restaurant program isn’t about survival. It’s about making a killing.
Upscale restaurants have begun putting real money into building designer dining shacks in expectation of big payoffs. In an article in the New York Post, one of these restaurants, Fresco By Scotto on East 52nd Street, tells of spending over $100,000 on its new shack. The owner is quoted as saying: “Although $100,000 sounds like a big investment, it will pay back almost immediately.”
The permanent Open Restaurant program is a con pulled off by Andrew Rigie in broad daylight. Public land — sidewalks and roadways — is handed over to a single industry, so that the top end of that industry can make inordinate profits. These profits come at a high cost for residential neighborhoods, the environment, and essential city services.
It’s understandable that elected officials made hasty, ill-conceived decisions during the worst days of the pandemic. It’s shameful that they’ve doubled-down on their decisions, cheerleading for an deeply flawed program so as to not disturb their political ambitions. Meanwhile, Andrew Rigie is given free rein to work with the Department of City Planning to remove the section of the zoning code that protects residential streets from excessive noise and disruption. He also works the phone, rounding up state legislators to repeal decades-old liquor laws that have kept New York from becoming Bourbon Street North. Andrew Rigie keeps working his grift and we’ll keep paying for it for years to come.
