Walk the stretch of 18th Street between Columbia Road and Kalorama that used to hold streatery after streatery, and you will mostly find parked cars. The wooden platforms that once fronted Air, Andy's Pizza, Madam's Organ, Tryst, and The Diner are gone, and in their place sits ordinary curbside parking, maybe ten spaces where a season ago there were tables and string lights. If you have lived in Adams Morgan long enough to remember 2021 dinners eaten six feet from moving traffic behind a plywood rail, the emptiness reads almost like a mistake. It is not one. It is the visible end of a five year experiment that DC just finished sorting out neighborhood by neighborhood, and the curb is about to change again before the year is out.
The Math That Emptied the Curb
The pandemic-era Streatery Program let restaurants build out onto parking lanes starting in 2020, and for years the permits kept getting renewed because nobody wanted to be the agency that killed off outdoor dining during a public health emergency. That changed on a fixed schedule. Temporary permits expired November 30, 2025, and DC gave every business, even those with a pending application for the new permanent program, until March 31, 2026 to physically remove the old structure. The permanent program rules required real construction standards: flush platforms instead of ramps, no fully enclosed cabins, and an annual public space rental fee tied to square footage.
For Adams Morgan specifically, a survey of 33 businesses that had run streateries found the annual cost of keeping one up could run $15,000 to $24,000 a year once permit fees, design work, and construction were added in. Kristin Barden, the Adams Morgan Partnership BID's executive director, put it plainly to Fox 5: the curb space had been free for years, and once owners understood the real bill, most said no thanks. By last September, the BID's count showed only three of the neighborhood's 33 streatery operators planned to apply for a permanent permit. Everyone else was doing the math and walking away.
You can see that math in specific decisions. Katherine Hawkins, who manages The Diner, told Fox 5 the restaurant chose not to continue mainly because the cost did not pencil out, though she expected the dining room itself would be fine without it. Down the strip at The Green Zone, owner Chris Hassaan Francke already trimmed staff over the same math.
Not every business walked away. Kelly Laczko of Her Diner in Adams Morgan went through the permit process and got her streatery approved, leaning on the BID's design and legal support the same way Pizzeria Paradiso's team did in Georgetown. That detail matters more than it looks, because it points to the actual mechanism behind who kept a patio and who didn't.
Not Every Neighborhood's Curb Emptied the Same Way
Here is the part that a quick look at 18th Street will not tell you. DC's streatery program did not shrink evenly across the city. At its height, DDOT had approved 270 dining structures citywide. That fell to 170 by the November 2025 expiration, and a City Cast DC analysis published July 30, 2026 counted only 39 permitted streateries left in the entire city. Some neighborhoods lost the program almost completely. Wards 4 and 7, which include Petworth and Deanwood, have none left at all. Former hotspots like Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, and U Street are down to a handful each.
Georgetown is the outlier. That same analysis found Georgetown holds 15 percent of the city's current permanent permits and half of the 30 applications still pending, meaning if every pending application clears, 30 percent of all remaining DC streateries will sit in one neighborhood. Georgetown's business improvement district ran restaurants through the application process the same way Adams Morgan's did for Her Diner, but it did so for a much larger share of its members, with legal advice and architectural design services built into the BID's own capacity.
That is the mechanism worth naming. The permanent streatery program was never really a test of whether a neighborhood wanted outdoor dining. Every commercial strip in this city wanted it. It was a test of whether a business or its BID had the cash and staff time to survive a design permit process that DDOT itself has admitted takes months. Adams Morgan wanted to keep its patios at roughly the same rate Georgetown did. What differed was which neighborhood's support system could carry 30 restaurants through the paperwork instead of three.
What DDOT Puts on the Curb Instead
The empty parking spaces along 18th Street are not the neighborhood's final look. DDOT has spent the summer deciding what happens to the curb permanently, separate from the streatery question entirely. The proposal covers the stretch between Kalorama Avenue and Columbia Road under Notice of Intent 26-185-MPDD, and it comes down to two final concepts presented at a May 27 virtual meeting. One option adds a hardscaped center median that narrows the travel lanes and creates a buffer for people walking. The other introduces painted bike lanes on both sides of the corridor. Either choice arrives paired with updated curbside rules, including new short-term loading zones, revised two-hour parking, and designated motorcycle spaces.
DDOT's own count found the corridor carries about 9,500 vehicles a day and averages roughly 309 bike trips daily, alongside pedestrian volume heavy enough to shape the agency's safety analysis. The public comment period on the plan closed August 13, and the department has said construction could begin as soon as this month if the design is approved, which means the version of 18th Street you are used to walking, biking, or driving down could look physically different by the time the leaves turn.
The Washington Area Bicyclist Association has been pushing for something bigger than either option on the table. Their public comment argued for a fully pedestrianized 18th Street with vehicle access limited to transit, deliveries, emergency responders, and accessible drop off, closer to what the sporadic Sunday closures have tested since 2022. DDOT's current proposal is more modest than that, restriping and curbside management rather than a car-free corridor, and WABA has said as much in its own comment, calling the bike lane option acceptable but pushing for it to be fully protected under the city's MoveDC standard rather than just painted.
What Changes for Your Next Walk Down 18th
None of this means the old streateries are coming back in their old form. The permanent program's design rules make the plywood-and-string-lights version of outdoor dining functionally over, and the businesses that wanted to keep a patio, like Her Diner, are now operating under platform and barrier standards built for the long term rather than a pandemic emergency. What is coming instead is a curb DDOT is actively redesigning around actual counted traffic, whichever concept wins out between the median and the bike lanes.
If you already live here, that is the practical thing to watch for this fall. Parking rules along the corridor are likely to shift again once construction starts, whether that means a narrower travel lane and a landscaped buffer or striped bike lanes with new loading and two-hour zones. The dining strip itself will look sparser at the curb than it did two years ago, and that is not a sign the neighborhood's restaurant scene is struggling. It is what happens when a five-year emergency program meets a permanent fee structure, and a BID with three surviving applicants tells you something different about neighborhood support capacity than a BID with thirty.
I have spent a lot of time on these blocks over the years, watching 18th Street go through its Sunday closures, its plywood era, and now this quieter stretch while the city figures out what comes next. If you are curious about how a changing streetscape like this one tends to affect property values in Adams Morgan, or you just want to talk through what a home search looks like in a neighborhood this specific, the Rebecca Weiner Group is always happy to grab coffee and talk shop. Let's connect.
