City officials will allow Fourth Street in downtown Columbus to be closed from 4 p.m. to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays to allow a restaurant there to have additional outdoor seating.
The city’s board of works has approved a special use of right of way request for the Fourth Street Bar & Grill for the additional outdoor seating.
“We’ve been working with them, and in light of the current pandemic and the need to improve their business climate, I believe what they’re requesting is very doable, and we’ll continue to work with Kurt (Schwarze) to make that happen,” said Executive Director of Public Works and City Engineer Dave Hayward.
According to Kurt Schwarze, who co-owns the restaurant with his wife Kelly, there are two parts to the request.
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“One is additional dining on the sidewalk next to our patio, and that’s every day of the week,” he explained. “That will allow us additional tables on the part of the sidewalk that’s not used by anybody else. The second part of that would be on Fridays and Saturdays, and that would allow us to potentially close the streets on Fridays and Saturdays to move tables and chairs out into the street. I don’t anticipate doing that every single week, because the weather’s not great every single week.”
Through Oct. 31, 2020, the restaurant will have the option to close its section of the street on Friday and Saturday evenings, from 4 p.m. to midnight.
“We want to be able to see that we’re going to use the additional tables on the sidewalk first, before we make any decision about the street,” Schwarze added. “Basically we just made both requests together to give us quite a bit of flexibility.” He also noted that if the restaurant begins to do more business inside, it may not need to use the permits for long.
Board member Mary K. Ferdon, executive director of administration and community development, said that since the city is unsure if there will be any festivals held on Fourth Street from now until October, any street closures wouldn’t be likely to have a serious impact on community events.
Schwarze said that although the business was able to resume dining-in at 50% capacity, as per reopening orders, many customers aren’t comfortable eating inside. Since the restaurant’s patio is also at 50% capacity, there was a need for additional outdoor seating.
Schwarze said the business will be able to add about six to eight tables onto the sidewalk patio extension. While this won’t increase the restaurant’s overall capacity dramatically, he said it will provide the opportunity to space out outside tables in a way that keeps people safe and makes them feel more comfortable.
He said that while the business has weathered recessions and downturns, the COVID-19 impact was unlike anything else.
“It was overnight,” he said. “We were doing great one day, and we were doing nothing the next. There was no scale-down. … A lot of times with a recession, you don’t see it coming, but it doesn’t hit in 24 hours.”
Schwarze recalled that the business had to close dine-in services on St. Patrick’s Day, one of its biggest days of the year.
“We had a massive amount of inventory that we basically had to throw away. Thousands of dollars worth of food and beer that we had on site for St. Patrick’s Day,” he said. “So not only did we get our sales slashed by 80% and that continues today, our sales are still down by 80% over this same time last year, but we also had to get rid of, you know, give away or throw away large amounts of inventory because, again, this happened overnight.”
Even as the state continues to move through reopening phases, downtown businesses will still be impacted by the absence of downtown workers, who may not return until Labor Day, he said. Their absence has meant a serious drop in lunchtime customers, which means the new outdoor seating is more likely to be used in the evenings.
“All the restaurants downtown are virtually struggling very hard with lunches,” Schwarze said. “There’s a number of them that aren’t even open for lunches anymore. And I can see Fourth Street actually making that change if things don’t improve, as far as lunches go.”
Hayward also noted at the board meeting that another business on a block of Fourth Street contacted him with a similar request, which will likely be brought up at the board’s next meeting today.
“Everybody downtown is in the same position, and really, across the country is in the same position,” Schwarze said. “But, you know, areas that have high concentrations of office workers that are not returning are especially hard-hit.”
