Pottstown, PA Special Events & Permits: Sidewalk Dining & Cafés (2026)

Pottstown treats a sidewalk or patio dining area as an accessory zoning use, not a separate license, and the standards sit in Section 507, subsection 9 of the Zoning Ordinance (Chapter 27, Part 5, General Regulations), added by Ordinance No. 2183 on April 8, 2019. The threshold requirement is a valid permit issued by the Borough, and that permit has to be conspicuously displayed for patrons at all times inside the establishment. The dining area itself has to sit directly in front of or adjoining the street-level restaurant it belongs to, and it must be kept at the same elevation as the existing sidewalk surface.

It cannot eat into the minimum number of required off-street parking spaces, and where parking is shared with other tenants, it cannot reduce what is available to them either. A restaurant may fence off the perimeter with railing, fencing, or planting boxes, but any collapsible or removable railing has to sit in a ground receptacle that can be capped, with anchors no deeper than four inches below the sidewalk grade, and it must come down entirely when not in use; no partition can create a tripping hazard.

The layout has to stay at least 10 feet back from any driveway or internal vehicle lane, cannot block the clear egress path from an exit door to the sidewalk, and cannot cover ventilation grates. On a corner lot, the dining area must leave a 10-foot clear space measured from the point of tangency of the curbline, the Borough's version of a corner sight-distance rule. Nonconforming uses are barred from operating an outdoor dining area at all, and Chapter 6's open-container ban exempts patrons who stay inside a permitted dining area's confines.