The Briefly for June 15, 2020 – The "Not Understanding the Reality of NYC" Edition
Today - Low: 61˚ High: 73˚
Partly cloudy throughout the day.
Still waiting for your absentee ballot for the June 23 primary? You're not alone. (Christine Chung for The City) Here's what to do if you've applied and haven't gotten your absentee ballot for the June 23 primary. (Brigid Bergin for Gothamist) Meet the six challengers to incumbent State Senators and Assembly Members among StreetsPAC's 24 endorsements for the June 23 primary. (Eve Kessler for Streetsblog) Here's your guide to the June 23 Manhattan primary ballot. (Robert Pozarycki for amNewYork Metro) Mayor de Blasio's appropriation of Black pain has suited his political ambitions, but when it's been time to walk the walk, he's tripped, stumbled, or changed directions. As a result, his Black supporters are abandoning him. (Jeffrey C. Mays for NY Times) “I think anyone who questions the ability of this city government to do what we’re here to do and my ability as mayor to use the tools of city government even in a time of crisis doesn’t really understand the reality of New York City.” I might believe the mayor if he said that about me, but I don't believe him when he's talking about the city's Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and City Councilmember Donovan Richards. (Joe Anuta for Politico) Photos: Let's be clear. If you were one of the people out in the street on St. Marks over the weekend, you're a complete asshole. (Jen Carlson for Gothamist) After an eternity of quarantine, a summer reading list emerges. (Meredith Craig de Pietro for Brooklyn Based) With nothing else to do, we've descended on the parks. When we found the parks, we all found them together and searched for our own spaces to attempt to maintain the distance that we were told to. With our dogs at our sides, we found little patches where we thought we could let our dogs off their leashes, because "they're good dogs." Little did we know that we found our way into and disturbed the domains of the birds and the bird watchers. (David Kobe for Bedford + Bowery) Tired of Tinder and Plenty of Fish and Farmers Only and Make Out Club? Business is bananas for match makers. (Angi Gonzalez for NY1) The governor gave the state's day camps the go-ahead, but the de Blasio administration is completely unprepared to help make the city's camps a reality. (Jessica Gould and David Cruz for Gothamist) Revel is expanding, again, this time adding its electric mopeds to portions of the Bronx. (Jason Cohen for Bronx Times) Ever want to rent a diner? Now (not NOW but in 2021) you can rent out the Golden Diner with the proceeds supporting the Brooklyn Rescue Mission. (Emma Orlow for Time Out) Pop-up drive-in movie experiences are going to be to this summer what pop-up pools were to last summer. (Regan Mies for amNewYork Metro) Heads up, Manhattanhenge is coming on July 11 and 12. Maybe this is a great year to skip it, as there's pretty much one spot in the entire city to get a good view and we're still gonna be trying to keep our distance from each other in a month. (StreetEasy) When Paramedic Megan Pfeiffer was interviewed on TV about how EMTs were sleeping in their cars to prevent potentially spreading Covid-19, she was rewarded by the FDNY by having her uniform taken away from her, according to a lawsuit. (Kathleen Culliton for Patch) Have you been hearing drag racing out your windows? You're not the only one, complaints about drag racing has quadrupled during the Covid-19 pandemic. (Anna Quinn for Patch) The hundreds of contact tracing workers hired by the city under de Blasio’s new “test and trace” campaign have been instructed not to ask anyone who’s tested positive for COVID-19 whether they recently attended a demonstration in the last few weeks. (Greg B. Smith for The City) How much does it cost to recover from Covid-19? For Janet Mendez, the cost is $401,885.57. (Joseph Goldstein for NY Times) At a rate of infection of 0.77, New York has the lowest infection rate in the country. The governor attributes this to the slow reopening process. (Kathleen Culliton for Patch) Ellie Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, is worried that recent protests will spike Covid-19 cases. Murray isn't worried that the protesters will spread is amongst themselves, but specifically, the police's interactions with protesters is the problem. The police were the ones not wearing face masks, the police were the ones forcing protesters to stand close to one another, and it was the police spraying protesters with chemicals designed to cause respiratory issues. (Chloe K. Li for Gothamist) All New York police forces must "reinvent" their departments or risk losing state funding as part of sweeping reform legislation Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law Friday. (Kathleen Culliton for Patch) There is a call to change the name of Christopher Columbus Park in Downtown Brooklyn and to remove the statue from the park. (Kevin Duggan for Brooklyn Paper) What's NYC without the police? It's happened before. A look back at the police strike of 1971. (Nicholas Loud for Untapped New York) The NYPD is guarding the Christopher Columbus statue in Columbus Circle. (Mike Mishkin for I Love the Upper West Side) Aakash Patel is creating an archive of NYC traffic camera feeds in the hopes that if another incident happens involving the NYPD, there will be additional cameras capturing what happened. (Shaye Weaver for Time Out) A billion dollars is a lot of money, here's what a billion dollars from the NYPD budget could do for housing in NYC. (Valeria Ricciulli for Curbed) A look at the five investigations into the NYPD's conduct against protesters. (Yasmeen Chan for Gothamist) A double-parked car on Park Avenue in The Bronx began a chain of events that caused the death of a cyclist on Thursday afternoon — but the NYPD neither charged the driver of the illegally parked car or the driver of the truck that killed the bike user. (Gersh Kuntzman for Streetsblog) A partial look at the NYPD's awful stewardship of Vision Zero. (Gersh Kuntzman for Streetsblog) Photos: Bed-Stuy has its own 375-foot long Black Lives Matter street painting at Restoration Plaza on Fulton St and New York Ave. (Sophia Chang for Gothamist) Governor Cuomo signed a package of police reform bills into law on Friday, which included a ban on chokeholds, the repeal of 50a, and others. While this is a good step forward, I hope that the governor and state legislature doesn't believe that this is mission accomplished. (Noah Singer for Brooklyn Eagle) A look at the street art celebrating the life of George Floyd. (Howard Halle for Time Out) After nearly seven weeks, the National Park Service has reopened Floyd Bennett Field to the public. It had become a makeshift parking lot of MTA buses. (Gabriel Sandoval for The City) One time when I was apartment hunting I watched an agent jump over a fence so he could crawl through a window so he could show me an apartment after he "left the keys in the office." How to avoid being the victim of a rental scam. (Alicia Schwartz for StreetEasy) Systemic racism, poor management, intimidating non-disclosure agreements, and a culture of fear. This isn't the Trump organization, we're talking about The Wing. A detailed history. (Ashley Reese for Jezebel) Thanks to the rush of white people suddenly interested in Black history and systemic racism, independent bookstores are struggling to keep up with the volume of books being ordered, but to quote Kalima DeSuze of Cafe con Libros, "W would prefer that he still be alive and I still be struggling." (Karen Rouse for Gothamist) NYC restaurants selling groceries and meal kits. (Bryan Kim & Matt Tervooren for The Infatuation)