Penny Hardy Photographs New York's Vanishing Pandemic Sheds

Photographer Penny Hardy has published "Pandemic Architecture," a book of photographs documenting the improvised dining sheds that restaurants built across New York City in 2020, according to a review notice for the title.

Hardy trained her lens on the wooden, plastic-sheathed and metal-framed structures that sprang up on sidewalks, in parking lanes and along roadways during the indoor-dining shutdowns of the pandemic's first year. The book assembles those images into what amounts to a visual record of an accidental vernacular architecture.

"Only a fraction of them remain today," the notice states.

What does the announcement leave out?

The available information is sparse. No publisher, release date, page count, price or description of accompanying text appears in the source material. A reader cannot yet tell whether "Pandemic Architecture" is a bare photo book, a survey volume, or a hybrid work with essays and captions.

That gap matters: a book about disappearing architecture lives or dies on its framing, and the publisher has not disclosed Hardy's framing.

Why do these sheds still warrant a book?

The sheds themselves mattered, even at the time. In 2020, New York effectively outsourced its outdoor-dining infrastructure to thousands of individual restaurateurs, working under emergency rules that were never going to be permanent.

The result was, for the most part, functional rather than elegant — plywood boxes, tarps, extension cords — but it produced an unmistakable streetscape. Within months, the sheds had become as much a part of the city's visual identity as any programmed public artwork of the previous decade.

What does "a fraction" actually mean?

That sentence from the announcement carries more weight than it admits. "A fraction" can mean almost nothing or almost everything.

The source does not specify how many of the original sheds are still standing, which neighbourhoods retain them, or whether any have been deliberately preserved. It also does not say whether the city's own data on them has been released or retained.

Those are practical questions a book like this ought to answer, and the announcement does not say whether it does.

What does this change for the record?

If the sheds are mostly dismantled, Hardy's photographs may be the most systematic visual archive that survives. A photographer who chose to document them in 2020 made a bet that the structures would outlast the news cycle.

That bet has, by the logic of the announcement itself, paid off at least partially: enough time has passed for the sheds to be treated as historical objects rather than current events.

The unresolved question is whether "Pandemic Architecture" offers critical distance on that period or simply memorialises it.