Greenpoint company helps NYC restaurants during pandemic with creating restaurant parklets

Restaurants are taking over the streets of New York City to allow for more outdoor dining, and a Greenpoint company is behind many of the seating spaces.

News 12 Staff

Jul 20, 2020, 11:27 AM

Updated 1,537 days ago

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Restaurants are taking over the streets of New York City to allow for more outdoor dining, and a Greenpoint company is behind many of the seating spaces.
Diners are just as excited as restaurant owners to have outdoor dining, and Greenpoint restaurant 21 says it has helped to attract customers.
“If they have somewhere relaxing to sit, in the shade to enjoy a drink, they stay for another round, you know, and that's the idea. So if they have somewhere to hang out, we get to entertain some more guests,” says 21 owner and chef Homer Murray.
The Greenpoint Avenue restaurant got its parklet or public seating space from design and fabrication company Pink Sparrow.

"Components that can be put together in a variety of different ways so that we can adapt to different size spaces and different locations throughout the city,” says Ellen Klein, design director for Pink Sparrow.
The company worked with the DOT to make sure that the parklets didn’t interfere with traffic.
“The decking system, which was an extension of a program that already existed in New York City called the Street Seats program, this is more or less an expansion of that,” says Justin Couchara, director of project management at Pink Sparrow.
The company usually creates high-end pieces for large scale events like music festivals which have all been canceled. However, for this it dropped the price significantly.
“Businesses have been hit really hard, and they can’t afford that kind of investment and so we dropped our margins way down to try and help local businesses and keep our guys in the shop working,” says Klein.