What you need to know for Thursday.
Coronavirus in N.Y.C.: Latest Updates |
Weather: Cloudy, with the chance of a morning shower and a high around 50. |
Alternate-side parking: Suspended through Tuesday. Meters are in effect. |
The City Council introduced a broad virus relief package. |
The New York City Council, meeting via Zoom on Wednesday, introduced a virus relief package that included measures to protect tenants, small businesses, essential workers and homeless people. |
The legislation contains a workers’ “bill of rights” that requires paid sick leave for so-called gig workers and extra pay for nonsalaried essential employees at big companies until the state of emergency is lifted, as well as a ban on the firing of essential workers without just cause. |
The legislation would also give renters who have been affected financially by the virus and shutdown more time to pay their rent, and it would offer housing protection to essential workers, the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, said. |
The meeting, which was streamed live, was the council’s first since the city shut down in the face of the coronavirus outbreak. |
The measures to help essential workers at big companies include a requirement for bonuses ranging from $30 for shifts under four hours to $75 for shifts over eight hours. |
The tenant protections would bar marshals and sheriffs from collecting debts or evicting residential or commercial tenants affected by the virus until next April. |
For people living in homeless shelters, where the virus has hit hard, the legislation requires the city to provide private rooms for every adult until the pandemic ends. |
The provisions for small businesses include suspending personal-liability provisions in leases so that business owners affected by the virus do not face personal financial ruin or bankruptcy. |
Deaths in New York passed 15,000. |
New York State recorded another 474 virus-related deaths, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at his daily briefing on Wednesday. The new deaths brought the state’s overall toll to 15,302. |
It was the third straight day that fewer than 500 deaths were reported, a sign that the outbreak might be leveling off after several days of more than 700 deaths. |
The number of virus patients in hospitals also fell, for a ninth straight day, Mr. Cuomo said. |
The mayor’s fireworks announcement drew critics. |
The fireworks show must go on. |
So said Mayor Bill de Blasio on Twitter on Wednesday, posting a video message in which he promised that the annual Macy’s Fourth of July pyrotechnic display would light up the sky despite the city’s current shutdown and gloomy prospects for the summer. |
“One thing we know for sure,” Mr. de Blasio said. “We will find a way to put on a show that will show how much we love our country.” |
He elaborated at his morning briefing. |
“This is a day we cannot miss, this is a celebration that has to happen,” he said. “Come hell or high water, we are going to do this.” |
The response on Twitter was swift and furious. Some people apparently felt the promise showed misplaced priorities. “How about u stop worrying about Celebrations and fix this city,” one user asked. |
A pick-me-up: There are tulips aplenty in TriBeCa’s Washington Market Park. [Tribeca Citizen] |
And finally: A routine New Yorkers won’t give up |
For many New Yorkers, the ritual of grabbing a daily coffee is one of the last luxuries they are holding on to while social distancing. |
On weekends, people line up six feet apart outside cafes offering cappuccinos and mochas to go. Bodegas continue to serve steaming hot cups of coffee to regulars and emergency workers alike. |
New York is fueled and anchored by its coffee purveyors, and contains more of them per capita than any other city in the United States, according to a study by WalletHub. |
Now that many of those shops have temporarily or permanently closed, a morning latte has come to represent something more: supporting a local business, while preserving a sense of routine. |
In the years leading up to the pandemic, Lesley Berson, 47, would take her son’s hand and make the trip across the street from their Harlem apartment to Lenox Coffee several times a week. |
These days, visiting the shop has become an opportunity to maintain that sense of normalcy and socialize, if only briefly. “I’m a single mother, my child is 7 years old, so to just get out and have a little adult chitchat was really nice,” Ms. Berson said. |
Noelle Quanci goes to Kinship Coffee in Astoria, Queens, once a week with her fiancé for takeout cups. |
“Right now everyone is scared and nervous,” Ms. Quanci, 29, said. “We’re trying our hardest to ensure that the institutions around us continue to exist.” |
Leaving the house for the occasional coffee, she said, was both a privilege and a “calculated risk” she felt comfortable taking to help a local business. |
Many coffee shop owners have found themselves choosing between keeping their stores open and risking the safety of their staff, or facing financial ruin and leaving their employees without work. The cafes that remain open offer only orders for takeout or delivery and often operate at reduced hours. |
“If we were to close, we would not reopen,” said Sabrina Meinhardt, the director of operations at Dépanneur in Brooklyn. “Customers are very grateful and say ‘thank you,’ and tips have been really wonderful. It’s support for our staff when sales are about half of what they’d normally be.” |
It’s Thursday — caffeinate. |
Metropolitan Diary: Tax season |
I was a new employee at Chase Manhattan, in the trust and estates tax department, in fall 1967. I was from upstate New York, excited by the whole idea of living in New York and totally prepared for the grueling work of analyzing tax returns in the period from January to April known as tax season. |
Tax departments work very late hours during the season, often from 7 a.m. until after 10 p.m. Every weekday night I would go to the subway station with my friend Sven, another tax department employee. |
He and I would ride uptown to 96th Street, where I would get off and wave to him from the platform as the train doors closed and he continued northward. |
My husband would meet me at the top of the station stairs and we would walk to our apartment at 99th Street and West End Avenue. |
Months later, I realized that Sven, worried about the upstate girl on the subway alone at night, would go to the next stop, get off, head south on the next train and change at Penn Station for the train that eventually took him home to New Jersey. |
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