How Bloomberg Made NYC a No-Smoking Town
The Restaurant Smoking Ban
Remember when restaurants had a smoking section and a non-smoking section? Neither do I, but I’ve seen it on old TV shows, so I assume it was real. But since 2003, lighting up in a restaurant or a bar has been verboten. For a while after the ban took effect, many bars went smoke-easy late in the night; two o’clock or whatever would pass, and the bartender would put out the ashtrays. But then the city got more serious about enforcement and most of the smoke-easies made smokers go outside even at three in the morning. Critics at the time said the ban would destroy the hospitality industry, but in fact the city’s food-service business has grown, maybe because a lot of people didn’t like how smoky restaurants and bars were. Five hundred cities around the country have since adopted similar legislation, making Bloomberg feel like some kind of fucking oracle. [photo]