Alice Mangan, a retired New York teacher, has her face almost completely hidden. This septuagenarian is one of the populations at risk of Covid-19. However, she demonstrated against racism Sunday, June 21 in Manhattan with hundreds of other people, almost a month after the death of George Floyd, this black man killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
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Empty streets, closed shops: around her, the decor is still scarified by the virus. ” Suddenly, observe Alice Mangan, we went from dead town to town in the street. “
Authorized terraces
Between daily demonstrations and the omnipresent threat of the virus, New York offers a schizophrenic face. Despite this disconcerting telescoping, “The epicenter of the epicenter” of the pandemic (more than 17,500 dead as of June 21) in the United States is indeed on the return.
With fine weather, picnickers take over parks and beaches. Cyclists storm the cycle paths. Acts of celebration or provocation against the police, fireworks are unlawfully fired until the early hours of the morning. On the outskirts of bars, forcibly converted to take-away, we spontaneously gather with friends.
“It’s like being in Paris”, laughs Bruno Portais, a Frenchman from the city. Since Monday, June 22, the streets have come alive even more. The city has entered phase 2 of its deconfinement, a synonym, for restaurateurs, of opening terraces. Under normal circumstances, the license to use the sidewalk is very expensive and difficult to obtain in a city with congested streets. And alcohol consumption is prohibited on the streets in New York.
Every New Yorker knows someone who’s been sick
With the Covid, the municipality has decided to facilitate the process and authorize the installation of tables on sidewalks, parking lots and streets closed to traffic. The city hopes to save 45,000 jobs and 5,000 restaurants. The big attractions (museums, Broadway, tourist sites…) are still closed, but the hotels see the customers coming back.
“The occupancy rate is beyond our expectations. The recovery will be slow, but demand continues to grow ”, hopes Manuel Martinez, manager of the Mark, a luxury hotel in Manhattan. With the borders still closed to foreign tourists, it mainly welcomes locals eager to change their minds. “They have been locked up for three months and want to have a different experience. “
But the virus may well have receded, the city will have consequences. The density of the population, which is the strength and the magic of New York, turned against it during the pandemic. With at least a fifth of the population infected, everyone knows, directly or indirectly, a sick or dead person.
Escape of the inhabitants
Between the 1is March and 1is May, 5% of the population left New York, mostly residents of affluent neighborhoods. The Big Apple had already lost 53,000 inhabitants in 2019, due in particular to prohibitive rents.
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“A lot of people are gone for good. For them, the crisis was the last straw that broke the camel’s back ”, summarizes Vanessa Pacini, owner of the Black Angel café in Bushwick, the trendy and artistic district of Brooklyn. “It will be long and difficult, but New York will recover. “
Living in the Rockaways, a peninsula south of the city, Sabastian Hajrovic, 21, has no plans to leave. On the contrary, this biomedical sciences graduate plans to get into politics. And he would never have dreamed of it without the Covid-19. “It is important for scientists, doctors, surgeons, to be elected and to be in positions where they can make decisions, use their critical sense, he said. We owe it to society. “
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