MAKE IT NEW: SHED LIFE

The golden age of the shed—New York City’s outdoor-dining boom, circa summer, 2020—produced some impressive structures. At Carbone, the fancy Italian place, people ate rigatoni in a cabin made of navy-blue wood siding with red velvet curtains.

- Naaman Zhou

Balthazar outfitted its shed with antique pendant lights, to make diners “feel like you’ve taken a train to Paris,” according to a restaurant spokesperson. Bookworms were covered, too. Three branches of the Brooklyn Public Library installed outdoor reading rooms, designed by the firm Aanda Architects. The Roadway Readeries, as they came to be called, were painted the bright blue of Yves Saint Laurent’s Jardin Majorelle, in Marrakech, with lyrical barrel-vault ceilings that evoked the breaking of a wave. They also had good WiFi.

But what went up had to come down. New standardizing regulations swept a lot of sheds away. (“Last call at the rat shack,” one alfresco detractor wrote on Reddit.) With the Readeries facing demolition, the brains behind them cast about for a way to recycle. On a recent warm evening, a squad of architects gathered at the Success Community Garden, a two-and-a-half-acre plot in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to canvass local gardeners about how the dismantled reading rooms—now stored in a warehouse in Queens—might be refashioned into garden structures.