An update to my wife yesterday from a niece who frequents Manhattan. It's exactly as bad as you imagine. "Horrible." Like a dystopian (my word) futuristic movie. Filthy, dangerous, ghost town, nothing to do there (all her words).
Long-time friends of ours who used to moonlight to afford junkets to NYC. . . have stopped.
New York City businesses are barely hanging onLike Mr. Barth, Mr. Gigante in the following excerpt, which opens the NYPost report, is looking hard to find a glimmer of hope, and trying not say the obvious too loudly:. . . “New York managed to become the number one tourism destination in the world by being the safest big city in the world and we need to own that label,” said [Jerome Barth, president of the Fifth Avenue Association], referencing the homeless crisis, high murder rates and rising crime on the subways.
“Perception is what matters in terms of people deciding whether or not to come to New York. . . ."Few things are as predictable as Chuck Schumer's regular Sunday newsers:Nearly one year after the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York, parts of the Big Apple look more like ghost towns, lined with shuttered storefronts, empty office buildings and businesses teetering on the edge of closure.
Now industry leaders and struggling store owners are calling on the city and state to turn things around — before it’s too late.
“I’m not saying there will be an exodus in the city or the city is going to die” without help, said Gino Gigante, owner of the Lower East Side’s Waypoint Cafe — where sales tanked from $500,000 in 2019 to just $80,000 last year.
“But you’re going to see a lot of unhappy people and a lot of empty storefronts.”
As of this month, more than 47 percent of small businesses citywide remain closed, while revenue for those that are open has dropped nearly 60 percent, according to TrackTheRecovery.org, a Harvard University-run database tracing the virus’ economic impact.
In Lower Manhattan, commercial office leasing dropped nearly 70 percent in 2020, while a staggering 12 percent of businesses — ranging from hotels to department stores to restaurants — closed for good, data from the Downtown Alliance shows.
“There are hours and hours where no one comes in the store at this point,” Alyssa Morrow, chief operating officer of SoHo clothing store The Vintage Twin, told The Post. “We’re down to bare bones.”
Restaurants, bars and cafes have been among the businesses hardest hit by the pandemic.
Schumer stumps for $25B in restaurant relief as thousands close in NYCSchumer's dad was an exterminator? I guess the apple didn't fall far from that tree.
Indoor dining is returning around the city, but struggling restaurants desperately need another stimulus bill to make it through the next stretch of the pandemic, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D.N.Y.) said Sunday.
The Senate majority leader said he’s working to keep thousands of local restaurants afloat by pushing for a $25 billion relief fund baked into the proposed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 stimulus package working its way through Congress. Struggling restaurateurs could apply for relief grants through the Small Business Administration.
Restaurant owners were able to apply for forgivable Paycheck Protection Program loans through previous stimulus packages that Congress passed in March and December. But Schumer is aiming for a dedicated program exclusively for bars and eateries.
“Too many of the places we know and love could close without the help, leaving a giant hole in our local economy,” Schumer said at a news conference outside Dirty Candy, a vegetarian restaurant on the Lower East Side. “My dad was a small-business owner. He struggled ... he was an exterminator. I know how hard restaurants are hit.”
Chuck is now the Majority Leader of the Exterminator Party in Washington DC, bringing their toxic brew of pandering and authoritarianism to the country as a whole, promising to do for the country what they've done to his state.
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Originally Posted by 80zephyr
