Easements in New York
First Corona, now mass protests and curfew: When anger joins suffering
– In the SoHo district, passers-by walk past windows that were destroyed during protests and covered with wood © Mark Lennihan / DPA
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There were just the first signs of hope in New York, which had been badly hit by the corona crisis, when mass protests broke out after the death of the African American George Floyd. Nevertheless, the metropolis is supposed to reopen – but it’s a different New York.
Many clap, some cheer, others hit pots, pans or tambourines: The every evening applause for hospital employees and other systemically important workers has long become a beloved routine for New Yorkers in the corona pandemic – but now new ones are mixing more and more frequently Tones below. “Black Lives Matter” echoes from the windows and the calls reverberate along with the applause through the skyscraper canyons – “the lives of blacks matter”.
For around 100 days, New York, which has been particularly badly affected by the corona pandemic, has been firmly in the grip of the crisis. There were just the first signs of hope from the hospitals, when the death of the African American George Floyd after a brutal police operation in Minneapolis broke the second crisis over the metropolis – above all with peaceful mass protests, but also with riots, looting and night curfews. In addition to suffering, there is more suffering – and anger. In addition to a crisis in the health system, there is also a crisis for society as a whole – the former requires people to stay at home and keep their distance, the latter pulls them out onto the streets en masse.
Despite everything, the first easing of the corona restrictions is to begin in the metropolis on Monday (June 8). In a completely changed New York day, however, almost no one expects an early return to a kind of pre-crisis state.
New York: More than 30,000 Covid deaths
Almost 400,000 people have contracted the coronavirus in New York State, which is home to around 19 million people, more than 30,000 of whom died after being infected. Around two thirds of these come from the densely populated metropolis of New York, where around half of the state’s residents live – it became the epicenter of the pandemic in the USA.
“I have never had such a dangerous time,” says Governor Andrew Cuomo. “I think it can be a positive moment for this country too – but it has to be done intelligently.” At his daily press conferences, Cuomo sets the pace for this and recently had a lot of good news: Fewer and fewer new infections, the number of deaths per day fell from around 800 a few weeks ago to less than 50.
The metropolis of New York now also fulfills all seven conditions for the start of a relaxation process – for example, sufficient free hospital beds and sufficient tests – and can be the last of the ten regions in the state to start, says Cuomo. Four two-week easing phases are now pending. In the first, for example, construction work can start again, in the fourth, cultural institutions, among other things, can then reopen – even if many of them, such as the Metropolitan Opera, have already announced that they will not want to start again before 2021. Hygiene and distance rules continue to apply. If the numbers worsen, the process can be stopped or rolled back at any time.
Completely different problems
The enthusiasm in the city is limited. “I don’t have the feeling that this opening process is going to change anything for me now,” says the owner of a café on the Upper West Side in Manhattan, who struggles to keep the business going with reduced opening times and pure “to go” business. He has completely different worries anyway: To the left and right of one of his other cafes in the Soho district, window panes have been smashed and graffiti sprayed, and with luck, his shop has not received anything.
Districts like Soho or Midtown, where there are many elegant boutiques, are hardly recognizable these days. Usually people crowd there on their way to work, tourists go shopping, traffic jams through the streets honking their horns. Now it is mostly quiet, few people and cars are on the road, and homeless people are littered in many entrance areas of closed shops. A woman is sitting on a bench crying.
“I can’t believe how much New York has changed”
Many shops have barricaded their window fronts with plywood after the first looting. Some posh department stores on Fifth Avenue have also stretched barbed wire over it and hired entire teams of guards with dogs. At other shops, the “temporarily closed” signs have been replaced with “for rent” signs. “I can’t believe how much New York has changed,” one woman says aloud to herself as she walks down Fifth Avenue. “It’s not the same city anymore.”
The silence is mainly broken by the protests, in which every day thousands of people walk largely peacefully through the avenues, loudly demanding justice and an end to police brutality and racism and singing.
Sometimes these noises mix with the evening applause. On the stairs in front of a house on the Upper West Side, two kindergarten children, one black and one white, are clapping, who previously – from a distance of one and a half meters – had told each other jokes, laughing with laughter. “Why can’t it just be like this all the time?” Sighs the mother of the black child – and claps even louder. “But maybe something good will emerge from everything we are currently experiencing.”
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