Comparing Sidewalk Cafes+Street Seatings with Open Restaurant locations in New York City

An exercise on NYC Open Data using Socrata API and matplotlib/seaborn

by Hanzhang Yang
Hanzhang Yang is an Urban Planner and level 1 urban data analyst.

There are some outliers in the dataset (e.g. a restaurant located in the Atlantic ocean when using the original coordinates.)

The Open Restaurant program started on June 18, 2020, in New York City give a lot of business owners a chance to provide on-premise outdoor food and beverage service. Before the COVID-19, application to Sidewalk Cafe can be as long as 100+ days, with hearings on Community Board, which sometimes they turned down the application. When the COVID-19 hit the hospitality business, the industry demanded the NYC government to allow outdoor dining. Gov. Cuomo issued EO № 202.38, which allowed outdoor dining throughout the state, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio followed with the abovementioned Open Restaurant program. Also, business owners were allowed to self-certify that they meet program requirements.

Data Source:
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/43nn-pn8j
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/d83i-6us7
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/qcdj-rwhu
https://data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/pitm-atqc