Fiasco Alfresco; how Washington's greedy restaurant owners managed to shack up.

• Author: Murphy, John
• Position: Sidewalk cafes

Over the decades, the Europeans have given us lots of stuff we'd be better off without, Like World War 1. Or phony Oxbridge accents. Like Fellini. Like Princess Di. But one export worthy of our gratitude is the outdoor cafe. As any owner of a Eurail pass can attest, outdoor cafes are one of the small but transforming pleasures that give cities life. They soften urban edges. They make the streets warmer and faces friendlier.

But the outdoor cafes in Washington, D.C. , are falling prey to what might be called the greenhouse effect: lass and awning enclosures that more and more restaurants use to cover their sidewalk extensions. These plywood, steel, and smoked glass contraptions squeeze the sidewalk, wringing life from the curbsides they're supposed to invigorate. The city's cafes are looking increasingly less like the Paris that Washington's visionary planner, Pierre L'Enfant, imagined, and more and more like mini-malls.

What's worse, taxpayers subsidize these glassedin hovels by offering restaurants public space at firesale prices. At the same time, a city law meant to promote legitimate outdoor cafes has backfired and shut some of them down. This has been the case particularly in the newly developed stretch of historic Pennsylvania Avenue, where a cluster of cafes might bring some romance to the canyon of Marriotts and anonymous office buildings.

How did the nation's capital exchange a forest of Cinzano parasols for a jumble of plywood shanties? Chalk it up to a weak city council. An incompetent city bureaucracy. And greedy restaurant owners, grabbing public space to peddle their grilled trout in year-round, climate-controlled, fluorescent-lit comfort.

The Astrodomization of Washington's sidewalk cafes may not rank as one of the great urban crises of our time. (Washington still has more open cafes than enclosed ones.) But it's a loss nonetheless. It's another of countless examples of public property being appropriated for private gain, another time when the touches that really could have made us a kinder, gentler nation got razed.

Curbside convertibles

While Parisians have enjoyed sidewalk cafes since they first enjoyed sidewalks (in the 1850s), Washingtonians had to wait until 1961 to get theirs. The thirst began during the European vacation boom of the 1950s. Millions of middle-class Americans, riding the wave of postwar prosperity, sauntered through Europe on their first visit as tourists. As the charms of sidewalk schmoozing took hold...