The Briefly for February 19-20, 2021 – The "Cuomo Versus the World" Friday Edition
Today - Low: 25˚ High: 34˚
Snow (1–2 in.) in the morning and afternoon.
This weekend - Low: 22˚ High: 34˚
• Ask An Epidemiologist: Should you wear two masks? Dr. David Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner and guy in all those commercials on Hulu, says two are better than one. (Caroline Lewis for Gothamist)
• Farewell to Park Slope’s Mission Delores, a fantastic bar. (Jason Diamond for Grub Street)
• 17 spots to go sledding in New York City. (Devin Gannon for 6sqft)
• A timeline of Governor Cuomo's nursing home controversy. (Nick Reisman for NY1)
• Not everyone is fighting Governor Cuomo. Cuomo took $145 million from the MTA's budget and they aren't challenging it. Of the $145 million, $107 million is being taken from an operating fund that is supposed to be dedicated to fund mass transit. Cuomo has not stated the reason for removing the money from the MTA's budget. (Dave Colon for Streetsblog)
• The Department of Justice and FBI are investigating Governor Cuomo's administration over the nursing home issue. (Jen Chung for Gothamist)
• Assemblyman Ron Kim has been criticizing Governor Cuomo for months about how Cuomo handled the state's nursing homes. When Kim said Cuomo was "trying to dodge any incriminating evidence," it resulted in the governor calling up Kim to let him know Cuomo would "destroy" him. (Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Jesse McKinley for NY Times)
• Answering the question of who is Ron Kim? (Christine Chung for The City)
• Pearl River Mart has found itself a new home at 452 Broadway, near Canal St. (Bowery Boogie)
• Gothamist held a vote for the greatest fictional mayor of New York City, using ranked choice voting, and the results are in! Mayor Lenny from Ghostbusters is the city's greatest fictional mayor, who also has one of my favorite quotes in history about NYC: "Being miserable and treating other people like dirt is every New Yorker's God-given right." (Jake Dobkin and Jen Carlson for Gothamist)
• Photos: 16 stunning photos of NYC landmarks blanketed in snow. (Shaye Weaver for Time Out)
• Where does Greenwich Village end? What are the boundaries of Bed-Stuy? How far So of Ho does SoHo extend? The fight over perceived neighborhood borders is heating up again. (Anna Ben Yehuda for Time Out)
• Interview: Did you watch us land on Mars on Thursday? Meet Vishnu Sridhar, a Queens boy who is the lead systems engineer for the SuperCam on the Mars 2020 rover. (Sydney Pereira for Gothamist)
• A look into keeping pigeons, a dwindling hobby in NYC. (Allie Conti for NY Times)
• Coney Island will be able to reopen on April 9 at a 33% capacity, but if you want to get in, you must buy tickets in advance and wear face coverings, and the parks must conduct temperature checks and clean the rides frequently. (Rose Adams for Brooklyn Paper)
• The city has new guidance for indoor dining, which includes limiting parties to 4 or fewer, wearing a mask whenever you are not actively eating or drinking, and more. (Tanay Warerkar for Eater)
"I’ve had to cancel counseling sessions to stand by metal detectors that children are required to go through, to monitor the hallways, or to “watch” a group of suspended students. I could fill pages with all the jobs I’ve done that have nothing to do with social work. The rationalization is that any type of human interaction automatically translates into “social work.” That’s because most people have no idea what a social worker does."
- Vanessa Vélez, Nobody knows what a social worker does. That is hurting our students., for Chalkbeat
• Maps: How Covid-19 impacted internet speeds across the city. (Jameson Zimmer for Untapped New York)
• Mount Sinai Health System has been canceling thousands of first dose vaccine appointments in the last few days due to low supply. (Caroline Lewis and Sydney Pereira for Gothamist)
• Sections of Queens, Hunts Point in the Bronx, and East New York and Brownsville in Brooklyn had among the lowest percent of residents who have received at least one dose of a Cocid-19 vaccine. (Sydney Pereira and Jake Dobkin for Gothamist)
• Maps: Vaccine data by zip code. (Davin Gannon for 6sqft)
• The case against Amy Cooper, the woman who falsely called the police on a Black man in Central Park for "threatening" her, was dropped on Tuesday after she completed a therapeutic program that included instruction about racial biases. (Jonah E. Bromwich for NY Times)
• How New York City's delivery workers survive snowstorms. (Jasmine Fernandez for NY City Lens)
• Amazon tried to block it with a lawsuit of their own, but Attorney General Letitia James is suing Amazon over the company's failure to provide safety measures for its NYC workers during the pandemic. (Sophia Chang for Gothamist)
• Barstool Sports is 100% garbage and founder Dave Portnoy is a piece of human shit. I hold these opinions for reasons outside of Portnoy calling New Haven the pizza capital of the world. The Coney Island Blog makes the (correct) argument that the best pizza int he world is made in Brooklyn. (The Coney Island Blog)
• Check out BKFoxx's new mural for the Year of the Ox in Chinatown at Dr. Sun Yat Middle School on Eldridge and Hester. (Anna Ben Yehuda for Time Out)
• The State Liquor Authority has begun to crack down on obvious violations of the rules of outdoor dining, suspending the liquor licenses of nine restaurants and bars. Most suspensions appear to be as a result of fully enclosed outdoor dining structures. (Tanay Warerkar for Eater)
• Real Estate Lust: A $2.3 million Brownstone in Brooklyn Heights with two outdoor spaces and three fireplaces. (Devin Gannon for 6sqft)
• Governor Cuomo has gone back to the drawing board on his marijuana legalization bill after being widely criticized for his last attempt over not doing enough to address communities hit hardest by the war on drugs and still criminalized offenses in ways that would disproportionally impact people of color. (Caroline Lewis for Gothamist)
• Where to find a work from home snack break in the East Village. (Hannah Albertine for The Infatuation)
• New York region’s subway system is the worst for air pollution in the Northeast. We're #1! We're #1! We're #1! Suck it, Boston and DC, you can't keep up with our air pollution in the subways. Maybe after reading this I'll keep wearing a mask on the subway forever. (Shaye Weaver for Time Out)
• Overanalyzing Andrew Yang's Instagram meals because sometimes we need a break from criticizing the stream of dumb things this guy keeps saying in public. (Hannah Albertine for The Infatuation)
• 28 Black-owned coffee shops in NYC. (Hannah Albertine and Nikko Duren for The Infatuation)