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Popular bar Time Again withdraws Open Streets application after Chinatown backlash
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Jun 12, 2025
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Ryan Kailath / Gothamist
By
Ryan Kailath
Published Jun 12, 2025
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Time Again, the Chinatown bar that became a sensation for its outdoor dining scene last summer, has withdrawn its application to recreate that scene with an Open Streets permit for this year, according to co-owner Alec Reinstein.
The move comes after residents packed a Lower East Side community board meeting on Tuesday night to decry the noise and crowds the bar produced in 2024, and to denounce its Open Streets permit as a harbinger of gentrification and the displacement of people “native to the community.”
Reinstein said Time Again decided to withdraw the application upon the advice of the Department of Transportation, which oversees the Open Streets program, and to avoid further conflict with neighborhood residents. A DOT representative declined to comment.
He said he’d be open to working with community stakeholders to find a solution that made the Open Street welcoming and accessible to everyone.
“If they truly have decided to not use the Open Streets program, then I’m glad they heard the community,” said Yin Kong, director of the neighborhood nonprofit Think!Chinatown, which organized a campaign against Time Again’s Open Streets application.
Kong said she would not be open to a dialogue about revisiting the Open Streets application next year, or ever.
“I really don’t see a way for us to work together,” Kong said. “Do your thing, we’ll do our thing, don’t take over our space.”
Time Again sits next to a dead-end stretch of Forsyth Street that separates it from Sarah D. Roosevelt Park. Last summer, bar crowds spilled from the sidewalk into that cul-de-sac without permission, leading to a summons for unauthorized roadway dining that was eventually dismissed.
GQ covered last summer’s scene with an article titled “The Hottest Club in NYC Is a Parking Lot on Canal Street.”
Reinstein said the bar could not survive without outdoor dining, which provides enough seating and revenue to cover the fallow winter months at the small space. Time Again will keep its sidewalk seating, which is also regulated by DOT under the city’s separate outdoor dining program, in a fraction of the space the roughly 900-square-foot cul-de-sac would provide.
DOT, which oversees outdoor dining and Open Streets, had given Time Again approval in May to close the cul-de-sac to vehicles from 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. every night for the next six months.
But significant backlash built over the weekend after Think!Chinatown rallied supporters to oppose the Open Street. They spoke about the noise from its outdoor concerts last summer; Kong said she’d personally stopped bar patrons from urinating on the wall of a neighboring business.
Also at issue were the cars that use that “parking lot.” Neighbors have parked illegally in the cul-de-sac and on its sidewalk for decades. And teachers and staff at the public school building next door use it as an access point for their private parking lot.
Tommy Chong, a building response team leader at Pace High School who uses that lot, testified against the street closure at Tuesday’s community board meeting, saying it would impede school business.
Reached by phone on Thursday, Chong said he didn’t realize the bar was using the cul-de-sac at all until a colleague showed him Think!Chinatown’s video of people sitting there during a permitted arts fundraiser on June 3.
Asked his reaction to Time Again withdrawing its Open Streets application, Chong said he recognizes the bar’s popularity and hopes they can expand in a less controversial area.
“That corner location had been vacant for close to 10 years,” Chong said. “Chinatown needs a little bit of rejuvenation after COVID, given all the businesses that shuttered.”
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