As restaurants and stores in New York City entered the second phase of a gradual reopening, an unwelcome realization set in: With significantly fewer office workers, residents and tourists, business was not going to be booming for the foreseeable future.
NEW YORK — Two middle-aged men stood on the corner of Maiden Lane and Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan Monday morning, surveying the quiet calamity: New York City was finally open for business, but their corner of the once bustling neighborhood was a ghost town.
“The difference with this one — this is the worst I think [of] all of them — is the unknown,” restaurant owner Bill Koulmentas said in an interview. De Blasio indicated enforcement of social distancing and mask protocols would only be in response to 311 calls and would not be handled by the NYPD, which came under fire for stark racial disparities in summonses.
Based on initial data collected Monday, Rudin Management Company said it reached just 5.2 percent of normal occupancy across its 14-building commercial portfolio. “I saw today firsthand that a huge majority of our agents aren’t willing to come into the office and I think that’s going to take a period of adjustment,” Steven James, CEO of Douglas Elliman’s New York City brokerage, said.At an Aveda salon in Lower Manhattan, a woman in an N95 face mask got a trim shortly after 9 a.m. Green Room Hair Studio on the Lower East Side had a lineup of five to six clients.
One Fair Wage, a nonprofit organization that advocates for such workers, launched a support fund in March to provide cash assistance to delivery drivers and other service employees. So far nearly 200,000 people have applied to the fund, the group said as it demonstrated outside Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office — part of a series of actions nationwide.
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