Three sisters from three different boroughs shared the same bench on the Coney Island boardwalk and toasted with cups of beer — together again at last. Teenagers with baseball gloves and a bat sneaked through a hole in a fence at a closed-off diamond. A manager at a Brooklyn clothing store insisted to a reporter that no, they’re not open, since that’s not allowed, even as customers browsed inside.
Officially, New York City is still in Phase 1 of the long reopening process, a land of curbside pickups and closed playgrounds and takeout cocktails that aren’t supposed to be consumed in public. On Thursday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city would enter the second phase next Monday.
But anyone stepping outside or taking a glance at social media has noticed a population already so far along on the journey to normalcy that they could be living in a different place.
New Yorkers who once ducked for cover at the sound of a cough a block away are stretching both their comfort levels and the rules, venturing out to lay claim to the parts of their lives they haven’t known since March. And they are met by bars and businesses starved for income and doing their own feats of stretching — of their necks, as they look the other way as customers gather at uncomfortably close quarters.
New York, the early epicenter of the coronavirus in the United States, is being observed as a barometer of recovery around the country, its slow-and-steady approach helping bring the number of daily deaths to just 19 on Tuesday from a high of 799 on April 8. But new surges of the virus in states like Florida, Arizona and Texas that reopened more quickly suggest the perils of letting down the collective guard.
In that way, too, New York City has become a barometer, of a nation of pent-up souls eager for a change no matter what their governors or mayors think.
It is as if the city is rebuilding itself, not with scaffolding and steel, but with cheeseburgers eaten at outside tables and fathers hoisting toddlers over the locked gates of closed playgrounds. It is a city built on festive, furtive and sometimes troubling pushing of boundaries. A lot more social, a lot less distancing.
“We made it! That’s what I say,” said Alba Cuba, 66, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, mask on hand but not on her face, at Coney Island last Friday with two of her sisters, Magnolia Garcia, 74, and Maria Velez, 86. They live spread out in Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn, and so had followed the guidelines and quarantined separately in their own homes, until recently.
Down the beach from the sisters, a Parks Department officer with a bullhorn on his truck ordered swimmers out of the water. Elsewhere, friends gathered at what has become the new watering hole, the sidewalks and streets outside bar takeout windows, and sometimes at outdoor tables that are supposed to be off-limits to dining until Phase 2.
At the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, tables and chairs have been placed outside on the sidewalk, for the patrons to have a place to sit while they wait for their takeout orders. The fact that many of them eat their meals at those tables is not the tavern’s responsibility, said its owner, Eytan Sugarman, 46.
“I’m not a bouncer, I’m not a police officer, I don’t have the right to tell them what to do when they take their stuff and go,” he said. (Perhaps customers are making assumptions based on the bar’s Instagram post: “Our Patio is …. OPEN!!!!!!!”)
Mr. Sugarman said he had bigger worries: “Survival,” he said. “I think the industry is facing destruction.” His is among the oldest bars in the city, “and it could close,” he said.
On Thursday, irritated by reports of people drinking where they shouldn’t, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said he would permit the immediate suspension of a liquor license for any bar disregarding the rules.
Other types of businesses are taking liberties, too. A clothing store simply marked ½ Price Outlet displayed racks of apparel on the sidewalk out front — but also within the shop itself, its doors open as if beyond Phase 1. As customers went in and out, a manager insisted to a reporter it wasn’t what it seemed — “Not open, just cleaning” — and shooed away two women looking at shirts.
Since the start of the lockdowns in March, the city has handed out 11,000 warnings and close to 2,000 summonses, according to Joseph Fucito, the New York City sheriff, who helps oversee enforcement. Even so, the rule-bending and breaking have become a brazenly open secret.
At playgrounds, children are playing on swings behind locked gates as their parents look on. One playground in Williamsburg was unlocked with a bolt cutter, and as of Thursday, the gate remained wide open. Baseball players sneaking through a hole in the fence at another park in Brooklyn did so a block away from a precinct station house.
“There’s been a lot going on the last few weeks and we’ve had to put resources into a lot more things,” the mayor said on Wednesday, alluding to the protests, still ongoing, that have followed the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He said that the city did not relish issuing fines to small businesses, “especially after everything they’ve been through, but if we have to, we will.”
He also said he understood why people were setting caution aside. “It’s been so long, they’ve been through so much,” Mr. de Blasio said. “But there’s a reason we’ve structured the rules, there’s a reason the state has structured the rules the way we have, and that’s to fight back the disease and keep it out of our lives.”
Among those gathering with others, there is a new logic at play, one that suggests that friends and family from different households who have been following the rules are no longer off limits. This leap of faith is the passport to places like Williamsburg, where unmasked friends have gathered under the sun at Domino and McCarren Parks and outside the bars on Berry Street, which has been closed to car traffic.
“They’re people we know,” explained Chris Burnett, 35, as he and his friends sipped beer and tequila on Berry Street on a recent afternoon. “I believe that my friends wouldn’t show up sick.”
His partner, Heather Sumner, 32, repeated a phrase commonly heard these days, the password for entry to these speakeasies in plain sight:
“We can’t stay inside forever.”
It’s a phrase that Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, hears often from friends who ask if it’s safe to meet up outside, or to invite others for a meal.
“A lot of this is about trying to manage risks that we can’t really quantify,” she said. “The odds of you being exposed to someone with coronavirus has certainly gone down in New York. At the same time, coronavirus has not been eradicated from New York. There still is community transmission occurring.”
That uncertainty weighs heavily on some. Sally Sargood, 48, who was sitting on the grass in Manhattan’s Bryant Park last weekend, explained the boundaries of her own comfort zone. “I have my bubble of five friends that I see,” she said, while sitting with one. “And anything outside of that bubble, I don’t feel comfortable.”
A new part of daily life has played into the decisions of many: the citywide protests over racism and police brutality, which continue to draw crowds from the hundreds to the thousands. From within, many participants have said they were pleasantly surprised by the efforts at social distancing and mask wearing that they saw.
Alejandra Pedraca, a 29-year-old living in Crown Heights, marched with the Brooklyn Liberation protest past Fort Greene Park on Sunday, where, she said, the end justified the risk.
“If it’s what the protests are about — police violence and people dying — then of course it’s worth it,” she said. “There’s no comparison between probably getting Covid and keeping systematic racism.”
Others, viewing the protests from the outside, saw in them a sort of hall pass for going out, with a large number of people — and police officers, many refusing to wear masks — behaving as though the coronavirus has moved on.
“It’s a double standard,” said Sasha Rosado, 40, a pediatric therapist in Greenpoint enjoying calamari outside with friends. “We’ve been told to social distance and stay home and, wow, I see these people gathering. It was confusing and irritating.”
Dr. Rasmussen, the virologist at Columbia, who has quarantined in Seattle since March, has heard all the arguments, all the rationalizing from her friends. She said she is not convinced, not yet.
“I’m still not really getting together with people,” she said Tuesday. “Just staying with my family.”
Jo Corona, Troy Closson, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Jeffery C. Mays and Nate Schweber contributed reporting.
