At least one positive development to come out of the pandemic is here to stay. 

The city's popular Open Restaurants program, which has turned sidewalks and street space into outdoor dining, has been so successful that it appears set to become a permanent fixture of city life during the warm-weather months - and possibly beyond.

“It’s time to start a new New York City tradition,” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement Monday, announcing the program will return in June of next year. 

More than 9,000 businesses have signed up for the program. Without it, the Mayor said, many of those businesses would have closed for good.

"It's pretty amazing,” de Blasio said at his daily briefing. “Just in the last few months, because of the Open Restaurants initiative, we now estimate that over 80,000 New Yorkers have gotten their jobs back.”

The program was already set to last through October of this year. Monday the Mayor suggested the city is considering extending that further, and beginning the program even earlier than June next year.

"We're going to look at whether we can go farther this year,” he said. "That's still an open question, but I think it was really important for the restaurateurs and everyone in that industry and everyone in communities to know it's coming back next year, so they can plan. And it's been an extraordinary success. We're going to see how far we can take it."

Details remain to be worked out, like how permitting will work in post-pandemic times.

And of course, the Mayor can't promise anything beyond next year: His term expires at the end of 2021.

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