In an effort to counteract the claustrophobia of Covid-induced quarantine and promote socially-distant activities, the New York City Department of Transportation introduced the Open Streets Program in April of 2020. By closing down select streets to through traffic, the Program aimed to (re)orient streets as spaces where collective life can take place at an extraordinary moment when the pandemic opened up a previously unavailable area for reimagination. However, once implemented, Open Streets have been actively interpreted and appropriated by private entities in divergent ways: while those incorporated into Business Improvement Districts in commercial areas help to perpetuate capitalist formations of enclosure, residents from low-income neighborhoods contest this usage by self-mobilizing around the maintenance of the streets, at times even informally enacting interventions against the Program’s oppositional forces. As such, this paper roots itself in the tension between participatory urban citizenship and the prevailing capitalist mode of territorialization. In navigating this multifaceted phenomenon, it also grapples with the fact that “Open” Streets come into being through the erection of barricades, an instrument typically associated with violent tactics of enclosure and dispossession. Ultimately, the Open Streets Program may pose new potential for a radical reframing of the notion of enclosure.