Lower Manhattan’s Local News
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Governor Cuomo has issued an executive order requiring all people in New York to wear masks or face coverings in public, including when taking public or private transportation or riding in for-hire vehicles.
More information: coronavirus.health.ny.gov/home or call 1-888-364-3065.All non-essential workers must continue to work from home and schools and everyone is required to maintain a 6-foot distance from others in public
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‘The Doctor Told Me My Chances Were 50-50’
A Widely Admired Community Leader Recalls Her Life-and-Death Battle with COVID-19
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Daisy Paez, a District Leader, makes a point at a late-February meeting of the New Downtown Democrats.
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Daisy Paez, a Lower East side activist who has served for years as a local District Leader, is a universally revered matriarch among Downtown’s political and community family. She recently returned from more than a month of hospitalization, during which she nearly died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the pandemic coronavirus.
“It felt like somebody just snatched me from my life and threw me into this horrifying ordeal,” she recalls. “In the beginning, I remember hearing how people would get really ill, and that if you had a cough or a high fever, you needed to see a doctor. But I was fine. Then, in the last week of March, I started feeling sick. I went to the CityMD urgent care facility on Delancey Street, and they gave me a flu test, which came back negative. They also gave me a test for COVID-19, and told me the results would be available in about five days.”
Later that week, she says, “it really hit me. I had a low-grade fever, but it wouldn’t go away. And I started feeling so weak and tired that I had trouble walking. Then, on April 1, I couldn’t stand up. And I had this violent, dry cough. It was hard to breathe.”
Ms. Paez called the CityMD staff, “and they told me to get to an emergency room immediately. So I called 911, and the ambulance got to my apartment within two minutes. Two paramedics checked the oxygen level in my pulse, and told me they had to get me out of there.” With lights and sirens blaring, the ambulance rushed Ms. Paez to New York Presbyterian’s Lower Manhattan Hospital, on William Street.
“I didn’t wait even ten minutes in the Emergency Room,” she remembers, “before they hurried me to an area in the back, where they stripped off all my clothing, and put me on an intravenous drip. One of the technicians said I was dangerously dehydrated.”
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Little more than a month later, Ms. Paez was stricken with COVID-19, and being cared for at New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital.
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After a comprehensive exam, a group of physicians told Ms. Paez that she was in severe respiratory distress, and in imminent danger of dying. They recommended that she consent to being intubated and put on a mechanical ventilator, to assist with breathing. Such a treatment requires that a patient be given heavy sedation — usually resulting in a medically induced coma — to prevent the metabolism from resisting the ventilator.
“I asked them what were the chances of this treatment saving my life,” she reflects. “And the doctor in charge told me that it was 50-50. He looked me in the eye and said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And I realized I was going to die soon. So I started praying.”
Ms. Paez asked the physicians and nurses, “to call my son, Freddy. And he told me to refuse the ventilator. He said I was strong enough to fight this on my own.” What followed was 48 hours of Ms. Paez battling the disease, but continually declining. “The readings said my pulse and breathing were getting weaker, and there was less oxygen in my blood.”
In lieu of using a ventilator, doctors opted for a therapy known as high-flow oxygen, which pumps multiple liters of purified air into a patient’s lung each minute, through a nasal canula, a lightweight plastic tube that splits into two prongs, which are inserted into the nostrils.
Because of the avalanche of patients besieging hospitals throughout New York, it was not possible for visitors — even immediate family members — to see Ms. Paez. “During this time,” she reflects, “all I had was my faith. I was petrified, but I prayed constantly. I kept telling myself that my God is bigger than my circumstances.”
At one point, a technician came into her room. “He told me his name was Jonathan, and explained he was there to draw blood,” Ms. Paez says. “Then he walked over to the window and said, ‘the Holy Spirit is telling me to pray for you. May I?’ And I told him, yes, please, of course. After we had prayed together, Jonathan told me that my condition had deteriorated to the point where they had decided to take me to the Intensive Care Unit.”
“When I got there, they told me two things,” Ms. Paez remembers. “First, they said, again, that they wanted to put me on the ventilator, because I was still declining. And second, the doctor told me it was time to call my children. What he didn’t say, but I knew he meant, was that I would be calling them to say goodbye.”
She reflects that, “how do call my children and tell them I won’t see them again? I can’t do that.” A grim reminder of the stakes was provided by the view outside her door. “I kept seeing technicians in hazard suits wheeling gurneys past my room, with sheets pulled over them. And I knew these were patients like me, but who had died.”
While she was weighing her options, Ms. Paez notes, “a nurse whispered in my ear, ‘keep praying and keep praising God.’ So I told them again that I didn’t want a ventilator. And I prayed, ‘Lord, if this is your will, let it be done, but please comfort me and give me courage.’ And I accepted that I was going to die.” At that point, Ms. Paez says, “my biggest worry was who was going to comfort my children?”
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Ms. Paez, on the road to recovery, shown wearing the high-flow oxygen device that may have saved her life.
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For the next seven days, she continued to fight the virus that has killed (in a few weeks) more Americans than died in all the years of the Vietnam War. The first 48 hours were encouraging — her vital signs slowly began to improve. But on the third day, “I started to decline again,” Ms. Paez recalls. “My numbers started falling. My heart rate was close to 50, and my blood-oxygen rate was in the low 80s.”
At that point, she says, “the doctors asked if it would be okay to ‘prone’ me. I didn’t know what this meant, and they explained that they wanted to turn me over, so I would be lying face down for 16 hours. They said this allows the lungs to expand more easily, while doing less work.”
“It was the most excruciating pain of my life,” she admits. “So I prayed: ‘I can do this, but not without you, God. Let me know you are with me.’” After many hours of intense discomfort she notes, “I somehow fell asleep.”
That was the turning point. “When I woke up,” Ms. Paez recalls, “I took a deep, full breath for the first time in weeks.” In the days that followed, doctors tentatively dialed back the amount of oxygen that the high-flow machine was delivering to assist her breathing. “As I got stronger,” she says, “it went from doing most of the breathing for me, to only half, and then smaller and smaller fractions. By April 17, I was down to one liter of oxygen per minute.”
“One thing that was amazing was how the doctors were learning as they went along,” Ms. Paez notes. “This disease is so new, and they know so little about it, that with every decision, they kept asking me how I was feeling, and explaining that they needed to know this as a guide for how to treat other patients.”
“A choice that may have saved my life,” she observes, “was their decision to put me on high doses of blood thinners. Since recovering, I have read about how many patients with COVID-19 have died from blood clots and strokes.”
As her condition improved, visitors were still not allowed into her room, but online chats and video calls became a staple of her routine. “When Congresswomen Carolyn Maloney and Nydia Velazquez called me,” she observes, “I wasn’t sure if that was to say goodbye, or because I was going to be okay. But when they kept calling back, I took it as a sign that I might be getting better.”
With Ms. Paez well on the road to recovery, doctors at New York Presbyterian-Lower Manhattan Hospital proposed to transfer her to the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, in White Plains, for physical therapy and remedial care. This plan carried two additional benefits. It would remove Ms. Paez from the front lines of the battle against COVID-19 (where the risk of infection is highest), and free up a bed in Lower Manhattan Hospital for another patient. “I was feeling much better,” she says, “so I agreed,”and an ambulance took her from Lower Manhattan to White Plains on April 17.
“When the paramedics took me out of Lower Manhattan Hospital,” Ms. Paez reflects, “I started to cry. They asked me if something was wrong. And I told them no — it was just such a beautiful day, and I had never expected to feel the fresh air, or the warmth of the sun on my face again. They were so kind that, in spite of how busy they were, they decided to wait five minutes and let me lie there, on the stretcher outside the ambulance, to savor that moment.”
“Even when I was in Westchester,” she notes, “I couldn’t go out into the hall. So I did all of my physical therapy — exercises teaching me how to breathe on my own again — inside my room. That’s how careful they were being about the risk of patients infecting each other.”
Near the end of her second week at the Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, Ms. Paez recalls, doctors finally tried disconnecting the high-flow device entirely — although they were ready to reactive it on a moment’s notice, if need be. “But I was finally able to breathe under my own power,” she says.
Speaking on Monday afternoon, she notes with pride, “today is seven days exactly that I can breathe without a machine. So I sit here and listen to worship music. I can’t stop thanking God. Why was I snatched out of my world? I don’t know. But I can tell you this: God didn’t do that. And why was I given the gift of coming back? I don’t know that either, but I know that it was God who walked through this storm with me, and brought me home.”
“I am forever grateful for His mercy and favor,” she reflects. “This changed me. From this day forward, I will take nothing for granted. I want to spread as much love as I can. And I want the world to know that faith can move mountains. So I will live every day as if it were my last, and treat each day as a blessing.”
Since her return home to the Lower East Side, Ms. Paez says, “my children and my neighbors have been an amazing support system. It really feels like I have come home and begun life all over again.”
Matthew Fenton
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Community Board Meeting Tonight
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6PM
Transportation & Street Activity Permits Committee
AGENDA:
Creating a Framework for Social Distancing on the Streets of CB1 – Discussion & Resolution
Manhattan Community Board 1’s office is closed until further notice.
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Letters
Esplanade Traffic
To the editor:
I am finding it impossible to walk on the esplanade with all the speeding bicyclists and runners (most not wearing face masks).
After the bike path was built on West Street, I believe biking on the esplanade where elderly and children walk is far too dangerous – even pre-pandemic.
Maria K.
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NEWS FROM PREVIOUS EDITIONS
OF THE BROADSHEETDAILY
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What Comes Next?
Assembly Member Proposes Post-Pandemic New Deal
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State Assembly member Yuh-Line Niou: “We must take this moment to fundamentally rethink government, and establish policies that prioritize the struggling many, not the wealthy few — while ensuring that the wealthy pay their fair share, so we have the resources to make this happen.”
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Yuh-Line Niou, who represents Lower Manhattan in the New York State Assembly, is pushing for a comprehensive package of legislation to address a broad range of needs that are expected to follow the ongoing crisis sparked by the pandemic coronavirus.
The 25 bills she is sponsoring include measures to help with joblessness, housing affordability, healthcare, childcare, and rising poverty rates, as well as tax reform that seeks to relieve the burden on low-income individuals and small businesses, while raising revenue from people and firms with the resources to pay more.
“In this moment, many are now realizing the critical role that government can and should play when faced with a crisis of this magnitude,” Ms. Niou says. “It must also be noted that many of these problems exist only because we have for too long followed a demonstrably flawed economic policy that sacrifices strong public institutions in exchange for endless tax breaks for the wealthiest among us.”
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Community Board 1
In case you missed the April 2020 board meeting,
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A Bump in the Curve, But Trend Remains Favorable
Rate of Confirmed Infections Among Lower Manhattan Residents Rises Slightly
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A total of 660 residents of Lower Manhattan have tested positive for the pandemic coronavirus, which translates into 75 new local cases, or a jump of approximately 12.8 percent, in the last seven days.
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A total of 660 residents of Lower Manhattan (among 1,946 who have been tested) are confirmed to have been infected by the pandemic coronavirus, according to statistics released by the City’s Department of Health (DOH). These numbers are current as of Thursday afternoon (April 30). Given the current City-wide mortality rate for COVID-19 (the disease caused by coronavirus) of approximately 7.7 percent, roughly 45 of these patients appear likely to die.
This updated tally for confirmed cases of coronavirus indicates that the total number of local residents known to be infected has jumped by 75 new cases, or approximately 12.8 percent, since April 24 (the date of the Broadsheet’s previous update of these statistics), when the total number of Lower Manhattan cases was 585 patients. This does not necessarily mean that the local rate of infection is growing at 12.8 percent per week, but may be a reflection more patients being tested.
But it does offer a glimpse of somewhat reassuring news: In the interval between two the Broadsheet’s earlier updates (on April 9 and April 17), the rate of increase in confirmed cases among Lower Manhattan residents had been 31 percent.
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Merchant Munificence
Alliance Throws a Lifeline to Lower Manhattan Small Businesses
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Jessica Lappin, Downtown Alliance president: “There is not one storefront business in New York City that has been spared by COVID-19. Every one of them is struggling. We are stepping up to do what we can to help stores keep their lights on.”
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The Downtown Alliance is launching a new program to help storefront businesses in Lower Manhattan, via which it plans to give away $800,000 in grants.
The Small Business Rental Assistance Grant program aims to offer immediate help to shops currently providing vital services to residents and essential workers in Lower Manhattan during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and is funded with contributions from Brookfield Properties, Silverstein Properties and the Howard Hughes Corporation, as well as $250,000 from the Alliance itself.
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C.V. Stands for More Than Just Coronavirus
LMHQ, the collaborative workspace operated by the Downtown Alliance for companies in the technology, advertising, media, and information industries, will offer an online workshop, “Cultivating Your Career in a Time of Uncertainty,” on Tuesday, May 5, at 12 noon.
Hosted by Rose Chan Siow (founder and principal of SCOUT, a talent acquisition and recruitment firm that specialized in women and non-profits), this virtual session is free to attend.
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Exhibition: National Museum of the American Indian
“Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field”
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Procession for the Feast Day of Santo Tomas. Abiquiú, New Mexico, 2019.
© 2020 Russel Albert Daniels
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Russel Albert Daniels was born in Salt Lake City, Utah and specialized in photography at the University of Montana School of Journalism. After a brief stint with the Associated Press, Daniels focused on documentary work relating to Native American identity and resilience, including projects on missing and murdered indigenous women as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in coordination with the nearby Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
Daniels’ essay, The Genízaro Pueblo of Abiquiú, delves into the history and development of the Genízaro people. Starting in the mid 17th century, Spanish conquistadors attempted to “detribalize” various native communities through violence, abduction and forced assimilation into European communities. The Spanish went as far as renaming the captured indigenous individuals as Genízaro, which is Turkish for “slaves trained as soldiers”. The history of their plight and persecution is forever encapsulated in their built and natural environment, be it crumbling, such as 18th-century church structures like the Santa Rosa de Lima Church.
Taiylr Irvine was born in the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. She has worked on assignments for a variety of news organizations such as the New York Times, CNN and Washington Post. Being from Salish and Kootenai descent, Irvine focuses her independent journalism on matters such as in-depth exposes and research on the diverse Native American communities in contemporary America.
In Irvine’s Reservation Mathematics:Navigating Love in Native America, she stresses the interconnectedness of government regulations and dating life for indigenous communities that seek to maintain their sense of identity. The 1934 Indian Reorganization Act establishes certain criteria for who can apply to settle on particular reservations; consequently, if you have lineage from multiple tribes then it can limit your chance at eligibility for a reservation. This photo-essay–which highlights inidigenous couples and individuals from the LGBTQ community, high schoolers, a council member, among others– demonstrates the impact that arbitrary “eligibility” standards have on one’s sense of identity and worth, as being a member of a tribe comes with a sense of honor.
The exhibition “Developing Stories: Native Photographers in the Field” is a series of photographs and essays by indigenous photojournalists Russel Albert Daniels and Taiylr Irvine.
Max Sano
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Free Lunch, and Much More
The City is providing free “Grab and Go” meals for anybody (not just students) who needs or wants them, at 435 public schools throughout the five boroughs.
Two facilities in Battery Park City—Stuyvesant High School (345 Chambers Street, near North End Avenue, and P.S./I.S. 276 (55 Battery Place, near First Place)—have been designated to serve Lower Manhattan as “Meal Hubs, each weekday, from 7:30 am to 1:30 pm.
Children and families are welcome from 7:30 to 11:30 am, and adults will be given food from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm. All adults and children can pick up multiple meals at once. Parents and guardians may pick up meals for their children.
No registration, identification, or documentation is required. Vegetarian and halal are available at all locations. No one will be turned away at any time, but no dining space is available at these facilities, so meals must be eaten off premises.
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3/4 BD + 2 FULL BATH Colonial on .23 acres (50×202) in desirable Livingston NJ. Quiet street close to NYC bus stop, shopping and restaurants. CHARMING OPEN flow from Kitchen to Dining to Living Room. Main Level Bedroom #4 (can also be used as a den) has an EN-SUITE perfect for guests. DEEP Level backyard, 2 CAR Garage, Finished Basement. Excellent school system
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The Food Chain
More than 30 Lower Manhattan restaurants and bars have set up GoFundMe pages to raise money that will help them pay employees and otherwise remain viable during the economic downturn induced by the pandemic coronavirus.
Each of these campaigns is an opportunity not only to help your favorite eatery, but also to make less likely the very real prospect that—come the next recovery—our streetscape will be populated entirely by corporate chains and denuded of locally owned small businesses.
The Downtown Alliance has set up a page with links to each, click here.
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Remembering a Fallen Healer
A Local Leader Recalls Tribeca’s Nisar Quraishi
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Nisar A. Quraishi, MD (1947 – 2020)
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Russ Schulman, a longtime resident of Tribeca and the associate executive director at Manhattan Youth, says of Dr. Nisar A. Quraishi, “he was my primary care physician for decades, and a trusted friend.”
Dr. Quraishi, who died from COVID-19 (the disease caused by the pandemic coronavirus) in April, at age 73, was a Tribeca pioneer, hanging out a shingle in 1976 at the then-new Independence Plaza, just a few years after earning a degree in medicine in his native Pakistan.
“I loved him from the first moment,” Mr. Schulman recalls. “He was always very thoughtful, very kind and reassuring. A great doctor, in every sense.”
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Where the Sidewalk Forfends
Data Scientist Finds That Downtown Footpaths Impede Social Distancing
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This online data visualization map shows the prevalence of streets in Lower Manhattan deemed too narrow for effective distancing from passersby.
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Although Lower Manhattan is among the communities least affected by the pandemic coronavirus anywhere in the five boroughs, it faces one increased risk that most other neighborhoods do not. A new analysis shows that narrow sidewalk widths in the square mile below Chambers Street make it especially difficult to practice social distancing here.
Meli Harvey, a senior computational designer at Sidewalk Labs — an urban innovation organization owned by Google, which aims to improve civic infrastructure through technological solutions — has completed an inventory of sidewalk widths throughout the five boroughs.
“It started a few weeks ago, when I was walking around Boreum Hill, where I live,” Ms. Harvey recalls, “and noticed that it was tough to walk while avoiding people. The width of the sidewalks make it necessary to move into the street. And suddenly, I made the connection between sidewalk widths and social distancing. I have also worked in the Financial District, so I immediately thought of that area and its narrow sidewalks, too.” To read more…
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An April Intervention
The Hunter and the Hunted, Along with a Haunted Onlooker
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Isaiah Berlin famously observed that, “the fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” A Lower Manhattan resident thought of this on a Saturday afternoon in mid-April, when Downtown was locked down, but he ventured outside — desperate for fresh air, seeking signs of life — and was confronted by this tableaux in the Battery. The raptor perched on the park bench knew one big thing: that he was too large to get beneath the seat, where his lunch awaited. And the squirrel below knew one little thing: that he was safe as long as he stayed where he was.
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CLASSIFIEDS &PERSONALS
Swaps & Trades
Respectable Employment
Lost and Found
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SHSAT TUTORING
Stuyvesant HS graduate
available for SHSAT tutoring. $40/hr. Zoom or in-person
Nurse’s Aide
Caring, experienced Nurse’s Aide seeks PT/FT position.
Excellent references
ELDERCARE:
Available for PT/FT Exp’d. Refs
Experienced Elder Care
Able to prepare nutritious meals and light housekeeping.
Excellent references
HOUSEKEEPING/ NANNY/ BABYSITTER
Available for PT/FT . Wonderful person, who is a great worker. Refs avail
Worked in BPC. Call Tenzin
347-803-9523
Seeking Full-Time Live-In Elder Care
12 years experience, refs avail
I am a loving caring hardworking certified home health aide
Marcia 347 737 5037
IT AND SECURITY SUPPORT
Expertise in 1-on-1 tutoring for all ages.Computer upgrading & troubleshooting. Knowledgeable in all software programs.
347-933-1362. Refs available
If you would like to place a listing, please contact
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Mohandas Gandhi was an lawyer and anti-colonial nationalist, who lead the nonviolent resistance against the British for India’s independence.
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1260 – Kublai Khan becomes ruler of the Mongol Empire
1780 – American Academy of Arts & Sciences) forms infirBoston
1809 – Mary Kies is first woman issued a US patent (weaving straw)
1855 – NYC regains Castle Clinton, to be used for immigration
1877 – Indian Wars: Sitting Bull leads his band of Lakota into Canada to avoid harassment by the United States Army under Colonel Nelson Miles.
1891 – Carnegie Hall opens with Tchaikovsky as guest conductor
1893 – Panic of 1893: Great crash on NY Stock Exchange
1912 – Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing (4/22 OS)
1920 – President Wilson makes Communist Labor Party illegal
1942 – US begins rationing sugar during WW II
1943 – Postmaster General Frank C Walker invents Postal Zone System
1944 – Gandhi freed from prison
1944 – Russian offensive against Sebastopol, Crimea
1945 – World War II: Admiral Karl Dönitz, leader of Germany after Hitler’s death, orders all U-boats to cease offensive operations and return to their bases.
1961 – Alan Shepard becomes first American in space aboard Freedom 7
1965 – First large-scale US Army ground units arrive in South Vietnam
1969 – Pulitzer prize awarded to Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night)
1979 – Voyager 1 passes Jupiter
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Nellie Bly. Her real name was Elizabeth Jane Cochrane and one of the amazing accomplishments of her life was working as an investigative journalist where she faked insanity to gain access to a New York mental institution.
On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:
“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
Another accomplishment was a trip around the globe in 72 days, emulating Jules Verne’s fictional character Phileas Fogg.
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Birthdays
867 – Uda, Emperor of Japan (d. 931)
1818 – Karl Marx, Trier, Prussia, philosopher (Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital), (d. 1883)
1865 – Nellie Bly, [Elizabeth Cochran Seaman], American journalist and writer (d. 1922)
Deaths
1309 – Charles II, the Lame, King of Naples (1285-1309), dies
1821 – French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1799-1815), dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena
1981 – Bobby Sands, IRA activist/terrorist dies in the 66th day of his hunger strike
2011 – Claude Choules, last surviving World War I veteran (b. 1901)
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The Curve Flattens
Rate of Increase for Confirmed Infections Among Downtown Residents Tapers Off
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Lower Manhattan’s eight zip codes are the site of 585 confirmed cases of coronavirus, up from 529 cases on April 17, which represents an increase of approximately 10.5 percent in one week.
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A total of 585 residents of Lower Manhattan (among 1,530 who have been tested) are confirmed to have been infected by the pandemic coronavirus, according to statistics released by the City’s Department of Health. According to the DOH data, the local infection rates (outlined out by zip code) break down as follows: To read more…Matthew Fenton
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Hostel Intentions
Downtown Hotel Business May Be an Enduring Casualty of Pandemic
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The Conrad Hotel is being used to house healthcare workers battling the pandemic coronavirus.
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As local travel and tourism have ground to a halt in the wake of the pandemic coronavirus, one Downtown business sector is undergoing what may be a permanent transformation. By any reasonable yardstick, the hotel business in Lower Manhattan has been drastically overbuilt — the result of nearly two decades of giddy speculation, by developers.
Today, there are 37 hotels operating in the square mile below Chambers Street, offering more than 7,900 rooms, according to the 2019 Lower Manhattan Real Estate Year in Review, a report from the Downtown Alliance.
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COVID-19 and your pets.
A Guide from the Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare
how to care for your pet during the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Taste of Tribeca Community Fund
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To the community,
Three weeks ago, we launched the Taste of Tribeca Community Fund.
Since then you have given us over $60,000 and with this we have purchased over 4,800 meals from 10 Taste of Tribeca restaurants for delivery to 11 New York City hospitals, plus FDNY Ladder 8, FDNY Engine 7, the NYPD 1st Precinct, and NYC Department of Sanitation Manhattan District 1.
You have helped to keep these restaurants in business, and in turn the restaurant teams have been doing some of the most important cooking and meal service of their careers, for the healthcare workers on the front lines against Covid-19.
The importance of your contribution cannot be emphasized enough. As another organization doing similar work has put it, we are not merely sending care packages as a thank you to the healthcare workers. We are providing them with basic nourishment, which they have no time to buy on their own, and in some areas no one even from whom to buy them.
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And in our little corner of the city, we have restaurants willing and able to serve and for whom our large orders are essential to the continued operation of their business.
We are now down to our last few thousand dollars, which, at our current pace, will last us another few days to a week. We would love to keep going until at least May 15, so please consider donating again if you can, and share our mission with your families, friends and colleagues. Your continued generosity and support will directly benefit our restaurants, our neighborhood, and the healthcare heroes in our great city.
Thank you from all of us at Taste of Tribeca!
If you can help us, we would appreciate it.
Here is our most recent campaign update sent to donors, plus our GoFundMe and Instagram feed. Our current meal count is over 5,000. Thank you,
Bettina Teodoro
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Who remembers Iggy, the 40-foot iguana formerly of the Lone Star Cafe on Lower 5th Avenue and subsequently perched atop Pier 25 by Bob Wade and Bob Townley in the 1980s? For some years now, Iggy has resided at the Fort Worth Texas Zoo reptile exhibit. The charismatic iguana was recently seen practicing social distancing.
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‘As Sick as I’ve Ever Been in My Life’
One Survivor’s First-Person Account of Grappling with the Coronavirus
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(Editor’s Note: This narrative was supplied to the Broadsheet by a Battery Park City resident who has asked to remain anonymous.)
When I first heard about this, back in late January or early February, I wasn’t sure how it was different from a more serious version of seasonal flu, because the narrative was familiar — starting in Asia, and coming from some kind of animal population. The one difference I remember noting was that this sounded much more contagious.
After that, I didn’t think much more about it for several weeks, other than to frame it as a kind of “second” flu season. But near the end of February, the beginning of March, my perception changed, along with everybody else’s. This was clearly different, because of how it had jumped to humans, and how aggressively it was spreading.
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A Bear Market for Apartments
Downtown Residential Real Estate on Life Support
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As business activity ground to a halt in March due to the pandemic coronavirus, the market for apartments in Lower Manhattan experienced something akin to a heart attack during the first quarter on this year, according to analyses from two real estate data firms.
A pair of reports from Platinum Properties, a brokerage firm headquartered in the Financial District, documents the carnage in Battery Park City and the Financial District. The first notes that the median price for condominiums sold in Battery Park City dropped from $1.515 million in the first quarter of 2019 to $1.005 million in the same period this year. That represents a 33.7 percent decline in 12 months, and a 14 percent decline just since the last quarter of 2019, when the median price was $1.168 million. To read more…
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Doing Good, Even When Not Doing Well
A Local Business Struggles to Survive, By Helping Those Less Fortunate
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In happier times: Karen Barwick (right) and her staff, at Tribeca’s Boomerang Toys
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Karen Barwick, the proprietress of Boomerang Toys in Tribeca, which has been a fixture in the lives of generations of Lower Manhattan kids, is leading a push to bring a smile to the faces of homeless children, who are quarantined in shelters, while also helping small businesses.
“We have teamed up with several other neighborhood toy stores that are struggling, because of being locked down,” she explains, “and partnered with Homeless Services United” (HSU) — a coalition of nearly sixty non-profit agencies serving homeless families. By browsing www.BoomerangToys.com, and clicking on the Donate button, users can purchase a toy that will be delivered to a shelter by the HSU’S existing distribution network, which already parcels out clothing and food. To read more…
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WANTED:
Your Coronavirus story in one hundred words.
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New Amsterdam Market returns in virtual format, as a service to the growing community of purveyors, distributors, producers and other small businesses who are creating regional, sustainable, regenerative, healthful, and equitable food systems.
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A pair of peregrin falcons are back in Lower Manhattan, high above 55 Water Street. Click to watch a live camera as they care for their clutch of eggs that are expected to hatch in the coming weeks.
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395 South End Avenue,
New York, NY 10280
212-912-1106
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No part of this document may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher © 2020
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