De Blasio says Black Lives Matter marches can continue despite ban on mass gatherings
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio says the protests are a historic moment of change that must be respected; reaction and analysis on 'Outnumbered.'
If you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere, so goes the old adage.
It’s been the story for many a starry-eyed artist looking for a big break in the Big Apple: Wait tables to pay the bills while auditioning, performing, singing, painting, dancing, writing, whatever it takes to make the dreams of success come true.
But there’s been a plot twist, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic putting food servers out of work in recent months as restaurants were forced to shut down their dine-in services. And much uncertainty remains over what restaurant dining will look like even as New York City reopens.
Questions of whether there will be enough business for establishments to stay open and even have waiter jobs to fill are causing concern about what that’s going to mean for the city’s creative class if the jobs that helped them be able to live here and add to the city’s artistic culture are no longer readily available.
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Losing its creatives is a “huge threat” to the city’s fabric overall, said Eli Dvorkin, editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, which advocates for policies that make New York City more equitable.
“That’s a huge problem for New York, which has been so dependent on its role as a cultural capital of the world,” he told The Associated Press.
“As a city we can’t afford to lose our creative edge. It’s been one of the key drivers of the city’s economic growth over the past decades,” Dvorkin added. “It’s one of the reasons why I think New York maintains its status as a beacon for creative, innovative people from all over the world.”
The pandemic couldn’t have come at a worst time, he told Fox News, for the creative ecosystem in New York, a city growing more extreme with no middle class for hustlers not slackers. Grassroots spaces have been closing in the ever increasingly expensive city, and younger emerging artists are finding it more difficult to survive this time.
He hypothesized this tipping-point moment for New York, right now in states of shock and grief, may drive artists away from the nation’s cultural capital and to Phoenix, Detroit and Austin.
Dvorkin spoke to Fox News about a sustainable future to save the cultural fallout. He said the solution has to be at the federal level and a major federal relief package is needed to save arts in New York.
With restrictions on gatherings, he recommended that more open public spaces should be made for performing arts, and the city needs to get creative about where spaces for art can be.
Last week the young kids of Downtown Manhattan did just that with Horseplay Comedy, offering a night of laughs and drinks and food right on a busy street.
Khalil Walker, 28, its founder, told Fox News why the event was so important to the city’s healing, so many lives, jobs and livelihoods lost in just a span of a few months.
“The need for art, community and creative outlets has never been more recognizable. The riddle now rest in facilitating that in a safe, responsible and conscientious way.”
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The virus has been devastating for the city’s restaurant workers. According to the state Department of Labor, restaurants and other eateries employed just over 273,000 people in February, before the city shut down in mid-March due to the pandemic. In April, during the peak of virus cases, that number had fallen to under 78,000. As the city reopened in May, it rose slightly to close to 100,000, still vastly below where it had been.
And while outdoor dining has been allowed in recent weeks, with around 6,600 restaurants in the five boroughs applying for permits to feed people on sidewalks and streets, the return of indoor dining has been put off indefinitely over fears that confined quarters would make virus cases spike.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
