Pandemic Architecture: NYC Dining Sheds 2020-2024

Pandemic Architecture: NYC Dining Sheds from 2020-2024, a photo essay by New Yorker Penny Hardy, captures a singular moment in time when restaurants were forced onto the streets of New York City to survive. Interiors once hidden from view were turned inside out.

Freed from conventional building regulations, a wildly varied landscape of outdoor dining structures emerged. Owners' personalities, tastes, fantasies, and construction skills were suddenly on display in a return to old-school punk, DIY values. It was a democracy of building the city had not seen in modern memory.

With commentary by Michael Bullock, Fred Bernstein and Robert Hammond.

Penny Hardy is a creative director and founder of PS New York, a multidisciplinary design studio. Her work spans cultural institutions, nonprofit organizations, architects, and residential real estate projects, connecting people to place through design and storytelling. She has partnered with organizations such as Open House New York and Village Preservation, as well as architectural practices and developers shaping New York City's contemporary landscape. Prior to founding PS, Penny worked in advertising agencies and design studios, including Euro RSCG MVBMS Circle, Agency.com, 2×4 and Pentagram. She holds an MFA from Yale University, where she received the Bradbury Thompson Memorial Prize.

Michael Bullock is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, and documentary filmmaker whose work moves between art, design, and queer culture. Animated by an enthusiastic and occasionally overoptimistic temperament, his writing and journalism returns to marginal figures, subcultural mythologies, and the spaces-architectural, social, and emotional-that shape identity. Bullock's practice is rooted in independent media. He currently serves as associate publisher of PIN-UP and The Whitney Review of New Writing, and is a contributing editor to apartamento and BUTT. He is the author of Roman Catholic Jacuzzi (Karma, 2012), editor of Peter Berlin: Artist, Icon, Photosexual (Damiani, 2019), co-editor of I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean Delear (Semiotext(e), 2023), and a contributor to 100 Years of Art on Fire Island (Phaidon, 2026).

Fred Bernstein studied architecture at Princeton University and law at NYU and writes about both subjects. He has published hundreds of articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, as well as in a wide variety of weekly and monthly magazines. In 2009 he received the Oculus award, presented annually by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for excellence in architecture writing, and in 2023 he received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters given each year to a person who has made a contribution to architecture through another medium.

Robert Hammond co-founded and served as the Executive Director of the High Line for over two decades. In collaboration with Joshua David, he led the transformation of an abandoned elevated railway line in Manhattan into an iconic urban park, now celebrated worldwide. Currently, Robert is the President & Chief Strategy Officer for Therme Group US, where he spearheads initiatives to introduce large-scale bathing facilities across the United States. He is also the Founder of Culture of Bathing, a platform dedicated to enthusiasts and the curious alike who share a passion for the art and culture of bathing.