Source::AP
NEW YORK,
Pamela Puchalski still remembers how frightening it felt when the coronavirus upended life in her New York City neighborhood last March. With terrifying swiftness came the first infections, the first restrictions and the first deaths. There were no answers to be found, only dire warnings: Stay away from work, from school, from restaurants and bars, from shops and theaters — and especially from each other.
“It was that feeling ... like you can’t trust your neighbor,” Puchalski said. A year later, the nation’s largest metropolis — with lifeblood based on round-the-clock hustle and bustle, push and pull — is adapting and showing new life. The renewal is evident in the stream of customers waiting across the Plexiglas-covered counter at Artuso pastry shop in the Bronx; in laughter wafting from outdoor dining sheds built on the streets in front of restaurants; in the parks filled with picnics, birthday gatherings and dance parties, despite the winter chill.
“What is the alternative? Just close the doors and stay home?” asked Gloribelle Perez, who opened a restaurant with her husband in East Harlem only months before the pandemic hit. For weeks after the virus descended on New York, the strictest warnings held sway. Businesses shuttered. Thousands of people fled. The only sounds in the streets were wailing ambulance sirens. Many saw it as a death knell for the city, a tearing of fabric that might not be repaired.
It’s still quiet, borderline moribund, in some neighborhoods, especially tourist-dependent locales in midtown Manhattan and in the financial district, where companies have made a wholesale shift to remote work. For-lease signs and boarded-up storefronts scar commercial strips all over the five boroughs. But New York is no “ghost town,” as former President Donald Trump called it in October.
On multitudes of front stoops and sidewalks, people now lounge with friends, masked and 6 feet apart. Businesses are welcoming customers back after putting up sheets of plastic to protect cashiers and laying tape on the floor to keep patrons socially distant. The just-passed $1.9 trillion federal COVID relief package gives reason for hope, too, with city officials saying it will offer almost $6 billion in direct aid to New York, as well as money for public transportation systems and funding to help restaurants survive.
Pastry cooks fill pie molds while wearing protective masks and gloves at Artuso Pastry Shop, an Italian American confectionary within the historically Italian immigrant community surrounding Arther Avenue, Wednesday, March 3, 2021, in the Bronx borough of New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
Perez and her husband have scrambled to keep their Latin- and Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, Barcha, afloat by cutting staff and changing the menu to make the kitchen more efficient. They’re also hustling a few extra dollars by offering pandemic necessities like disinfecting sprays, wipes and toilet paper for sale along with dinner deliveries.
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