Good morning. It's Wednesday. We'll recap last night's tense and testy debate between the two candidates for governor in New York. We'll also look at a city report that found that the Open Streets program helped some eating and drinking establishments weather the pandemic. |
 | | Mary Altaffer/Pool, Associated Press, via Associated Press |
|
Gov. Kathy Hochul and Representative Lee Zeldin faced off in their first and only scheduled debate, with Zeldin, the Republican, playing offense, painting a bleak portrait of New York under Hochul and all but shouting as he railed against high crime rates and high taxes. |
"You're poorer and less safe thanks to Kathy Hochul," he said, repeating his promise to fire the Manhattan district attorney and declare a state of emergency to suspend the state's cashless bail laws. |
Hochul sought to show that her administration had already addressed crime and was continuing to do so. She mentioned "public safety" before abortion, an indication of how the contours of the race have changed in the last few weeks. Until recently she had made abortion access the centerpiece of her campaign. But she also accused Zeldin of fearmongering. |
"You can either work on keeping people scared or you can focus on keeping them safe," she said, before referring to a multistate task force she convened to slow the torrent of guns coming into New York. |
Later, she said she understood subway passengers' fears — "This fear is real," she said — and talked about joining Mayor Eric Adams to increase the police presence in the subways. She also referred to her push to install cameras in subway cars and to "care for the people who are severely mentally ill and can have an episode that can cause harm." |
Hochul also attacked Zeldin as "one of Donald Trump's strongest and most loyal supporters." Zeldin, apparently not wanting to alienate Trump or his supporters, refused to say if he would support the idea of another Trump candidacy. |
And in a segment in which the candidates questioned each other, Zeldin did not say yes or no when Hochul asked: "Yes or no: Is Donald Trump a great president?" Zeldin spoke for nearly a minute about what he considered Trump's accomplishments in office. |
"I'll take that as a resounding yes," Hochul said. |
They accused each other of corruption and extremism, and they sparred on economic development, with Zeldin saying he would not sign a bill that would limit some energy-hungry cryptocurrency mining facilities and Hochul saying she was "looking at that bill closely." |
Zeldin attacked congestion pricing for Midtown Manhattan, which would bring in $1 billion in revenue to help fund mass transit, and lamented rising rents for apartment tenants and rising interest rates that threaten to price first-time homeowners out of their dreams. Hochul defended a deal to provide subsidies for a new stadium for the Buffalo Bills; Zeldin said he would renegotiate it. |
But my colleagues Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Michael Gold write that neither candidate appeared to have a major breakout moment — or a gaffe — that would change the direction of the race. Recent polls indicate that the gap between them has narrowed as concerns about crime and inflation have grown. Last week, a Quinnipiac University poll gave Hochul only a four-point advantage over Zeldin. A separate poll from Siena College put her 11 points ahead, but that was down from her 17-point lead last month. |
Zeldin projected absolute certainty that he would win: "Losing is not an option," he declared, after repeatedly listing changes he would make on his first day in office. |
As for abortion, Hochul told Zeldin that he could not escape his record. "You're the only person standing on this stage whose name right now — not years past — that right now, is on a bill called 'Life Begins at Conception'. You did that now," she said. Zeldin, who has voted repeatedly in Congress to limit abortion rights and celebrated the Supreme Court's decision overturning Roe v. Wade, countered that even if he wanted to, he could not unilaterally change New York's protections. |
Expect cloudy skies and temperatures reaching the high 60s, with a chance of showers. At night, temps will drop into the high 50s. |
In effect until Tuesday (All Saints Day). |
 | | Letitia James, the New York attorney general, said the Buffalo diocese had "breached parishioners' trust and caused many a crisis of faith."Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times |
|
The economics of outdoor dining |
 | | Sebastian Mejias for The New York Times |
|
Miro Gal sighed the sigh of a New York restaurateur who has lived through the pandemic — "You surely know what we've been through" — before saying that without the city's Open Streets program, he and his partners would have given up last year. |
"Adding the outdoor structures that restaurants have in front of them on the roadside and the Open Streets program literally saved our life," he said. "I'm not sure what the situation is with other restaurants and cafes, but the fact that most everybody put them up means they work." |
The city says the Open Streets program grew out of the need for a space where people could gather safely in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. It proved to be an economic lifeline. |
A new city report found that restaurants and bars on Open Streets blocks, where traffic is barred at certain times and restaurants can set up tables beyond their sidewalk structures, reported stronger sales than those on similar commercial streets where car traffic moved the same as always. Some restaurants on Open Streets blocks even did better than they did before the pandemic, according to the report, which analyzed taxable revenue collected by restaurants and bars in Astoria, Queens; Chinatown and Koreatown in Manhattan; and Park Slope and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn. |
On Fifth Avenue in Park Slope — where Gal's restaurant, Bricolage, has been in business since 2015 — the report said that during the summer of 2021, sales were 26 percent above the average from 2016 to 2019. On a similar four-block stretch of Seventh Avenue, restaurant sales dropped 17 percent in the same period. |
By contrast, Janette Sadik-Khan, a former city transportation commissioner and a principal with Bloomberg Associates, which helped produce the report, called Open Streets "an economic success story." And Gal said that on some Saturdays and Sundays, Open Streets had doubled revenue at Bricolage because it could serve almost twice as many customers. |
It was 1988. I had just left my husband after three years of marriage, moved out of our Woodside apartment and taken the first place I could find that I could afford. It was in Bensonhurst. |
Young and newly single, I was excited to decorate the apartment with shelves and other homey touches, and a trip to the neighborhood lumberyard proved fruitful. |
A nice young man helped me find wood and hardware for the shelves and then continued to walk with me as I scanned the aisles for anything else I might need. |
"So, uh, where ya from, anyway?" he asked. |
I paused for a second, trying to decide if he was asking about ethnicity or geography. I decided he meant the latter. |
"I just moved here from Queens," I said. |
"Yeah, that's what I thought," he said in the most Brooklyn voice I'd ever heard. "Ya got an accent." |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero, Ed Shanahan and Winnie Hu contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment