is New York City dead?

It's very weird. I read this piece, which seemed to suggest that one theory was that it was white gentrifiers complaining more about something that happens every year

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinehaskins1/flatbush-brooklyn-fireworks-nypd-police-blm

Other people see it the other way around:

White people in Washington Heights: "It's like this every year."

Black/Brown people in Washington Heights: "It has never been like this EVER before. This is some NEXT-LEVEL, scheduled, coordinated shit!"

— Son of Baldwin (Robert Jones, Jr.) (@SonofBaldwin) June 20, 2020

It literally sounded like a truckload of fireworks had gone off at once at one point in my street last night (I'm at the Crown Heights side of Prospect Lefferts Gardens. It doesn't bother me that much personally but it's just so weird, the number of them, like yeah, it must cost a fortune.

british kids set off fireworks for a good two weeks before guy fawkes day - so why not two weeks before july 4?

well, this would be the first time i've ever experienced it

i don't really buy that it's the cops but who knows

In a facebook group I'm in people have been reporting them everywhere from wealthy westchester county ny suburbs to charlottesville va, so I don't think it's some kind of terror campaign against black and brown communities, but who the fuck knows. One theory is just that people are bored and cooped up and there are already usually amateur fireworks this time of year, so there's just a lot more. Firework stores have reported upticks in sales.

I certainly wouldn't rule out a more nefarious explanation, but social media has a tendency to need to give everything a nefarious explanation

there was one crazy night about a week ago I heard outside the hospital, but I don't know the norms for El Barrio

We’ve been hearing fireworks for about a couple weeks here in northwest DC. Big shows the night of juneteenth. I assume it’s neighborhood folks having fun with their stockpiles leading up to July 4, which isn’t uncommon.

Tracer, having lived in inner London through many a Guy Fawkes season, this is of a different order of intensity.

I am hearing the munitions dump explosion ones here in LA too for the first time fwiw

https://gothamist.com/news/everything-you-need-know-about-phase-2-reopening-nyc

*Boom* *pop*

what on earth

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EbJHpw9XgAEilV4?format=jpg&name=small

fuck that sideways

Are they going to raise the price of a slice of pizza to $9 too?

Just imagine how many cops they can pay overtime to for standing at the turnstiles to enforce the new fare.

it's a nonstarter of an idea insofar as it would shut down every restaurant in the city.

Just got offered my first fireworks in the street. Passed up the opportunity to ask him if he was being supplied by the Feds.

you just became a real new yorker

wtf is with these people and blowing shit up

https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/macys-fireworks-2020-nyc.html

As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio puts together an entire task force to crack down on the illegal fireworks bored kids have been setting off across the city, he’s also green-lighting a week of Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks shows across each of the five boroughs starting June 29. “In reimagining this year’s show, the idea of bringing elements to many parts of our hometown resonated with our team and partners in the City of New York,” Susan Tercero, executive producer of Macy’s 4th of July Fireworks show, said in a statement to ABC 7. The fireworks will be set off at a “high elevation, unannounced” to prevent people from gathering to watch them. There will be five minutes of explosions, with no warning, each night leading up to July 4’s televised grand finale, which will feature the “best of” the previous five nights.

Wait, that's satire, right?

"unannounced"

no, they're serious! Vulture's added their own layer of snark but it's factually accurate.
Video here:
https://abc7ny.com/society/macys-fireworks-in-nyc-will-be-a-series-of-smaller-displays/6261681/

it is dumb as fuck!

It really is, incredible that would be their response. I did hear of some Chicago suburbs that are talking about spreading out and doing smaller displays to reduce congregating to watch but, afaik, those are all scheduled and announced.

the pure tone deafness of siccing the cops on kids in the streets but okaying a major corporation to do THE SAME SHIT

https://patch.com/new-york/bed-stuy/fireworks-complaints-not-job-cops-brooklyn-pols-say

too easy to imagine the police in that article telling people to call a community group for support having a shit-eating grin on his face, as he says it

i mean

The explosions heard in the Bronx are just PD controlled detonation of confescated fireworks at Rodmans Neck pic.twitter.com/PwK9pAxGV0

— NYCFireWire (@NYCFireWire) June 22, 2020

NYPD conducted a controlled detonation on Rodman Neck to eliminate confiscated fireworks. That caused brush fire to breake out and had to extinguished by FDNY and Nassau County marine units from the water.
Video by Daniel Valls (FNTV) d✧✧✧@scootercas✧✧✧.c✧✧ to license pic.twitter.com/O2re1s90yK

— @SCOOTERCASTER (FNTV) (@ScooterCasterNY) June 22, 2020

gothamist with the A+ URL
https://gothamist.com/news/between-illegal-fireworks-displays-every-borough-will-get-five-blissful-minutes-legal-fireworks-macys-fourth-july-celebration

pack it up

Times Square’s glitzy, four-story McDonald’s is permanently shutting down https://t.co/YxrB5KRgrv pic.twitter.com/q6XEuGKO5w

— Eater NY (@EaterNY) June 24, 2020

it was, for a time, one of the few reliable bathrooms in times square. RIP

I was about to say bring back the Howard Johnson’s but that place was an overpriced deadzone. I remember being hungover one time with little cash and thinking I could hit the Hojo for some cheap breakfast. Fucking hell.

xp lol yes it was

it should be memorialized as a giant pit that anyone who can claim a new york residence can shit in

here's a terrible idea
https://gothamist.com/news/mta-explores-use-artificial-intelligence-measure-mask-compliance-subways

https://comb.io/0GQX8r

Why are we moving towards indoor dining?

Is it because we want no responsibility for the massive restaurant bankruptcies to come?

This gives restaurants half full seating, enough so they can fail more slowly, while risking thousands of lives?

Bail them out instead.

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) June 27, 2020

zephyr otm

for real. I mean, yeah, it'd piss off the needledicks who can't stand the idea of not being able to go out and get a pint, but restaurant owners could relax and pay their furloughed employees without fear.

but nooooooooo, that's not what made America great! so the federal government will probably just annex each restaurant as its own sovereign territory and deport all restaurant owners to Canada.

i'm really fucking glad my friend's cat cafe got an EIDL loan, but he's got such a low cost operation going, he was able to adjust and work with the landlord to stay afloat. restaurants that have to buy large volumes of food product/beverage product and have high overhead , I don't even wanna imagine.

https://i.imgur.com/4B9qfOB.jpg

Anyone have any tips on where these undisclosed locations are? They have to be on the waterfront somewhere around Manhattan right ? How could they keep this a secret?

Macy's Fireworks Are Playing at My House

unimaginable

last i heard nabes were gettin 'heads up' due to complaints by vets with PTSD

https://ny.eater.com/2020/6/29/21306893/indoor-dining-delay-nyc-coronavirus
this is probably the right call

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/07/06/a-black-market-fireworks-dealer-explains-this-years-boom

Last week, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a thin man in a white T-shirt and a wide-brimmed Chicago Bulls cap proudly popped the trunk of his Chevy Malibu. Inside, there were Golden Willows, Chain Reactions, Parachute Battal­ions, and Mini Artillery Shells—dozens of colorful boxes, one of them labelled “For Daytime Use!” This was what remained of the twelve hundred dollars’ worth of fireworks that the man, who asked not to be named, had purchased during a visit to Keystone Fireworks, in Pennsylvania, and then sold, for more than double the price, around Brooklyn. (Fireworks are illegal in New York State.) He takes calls for deliveries from ­regular customers, or parks on a busy street and does business, out of his car, with ­whoever stops by. “People have always done fireworks,” he said, “but they’re going harder than ever this year. They can’t wait to come ­outside.”

“The money’s good,” the man in the Bulls cap said. This year, he sold in two days what would have normally taken him two weeks.

His fireworks aren’t cheap; the ­fanciest ones in his trunk go for two hundred bucks. So most of his customers are adults—“people with money,” he said—rather than teen-agers. Nearly all of them are men. They tend to be in their late twen­ties or thirties, and sometimes, if they’re buying fireworks before the sun has set, they bring their kids with them. That night, the man gestured around at the neighborhood, which was coming off a four-month lockdown. “They’re celebrating,” he said of the people setting off the fireworks. “It’s definitely about freedom.”

“I hope not” was all he had to say when asked if he thought police were shooting off fireworks. “We don’t need any more drama around here.”

A few blocks over, a group of young men, probably in their twenties, launched a several-minutes-long blitz. They took turns darting from the sidewalk into the street to light streams of Roman candles, which they topped off with five-hundred-­gram “cakes”: the largest firework that can be legally used without a ­federal explosives permit. People watched from their apartment buildings. One neighbor leaned out his window and begged the group to stop; the fireworks were scaring his dog. “Fuck your dog!” one of the men yelled back at him. “We will shoot these shits at your house!” Moments later, a cop car rolled up, and the group retreated.

new york city . . . lives

New study of Covid seroprevalence in New York by @florian_krammer and team; finds that 1:5 New Yorkers likely already had SARS-CoV-2 by late April and the infection fatality rate in New York City was about 0.7%. https://t.co/ekqxUuhGwv

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) June 29, 2020

finding it hard to believe regardless

Most of the estimates of ifr I saw that were being tossed about months ago based on Asian data were in the range of 0.5% to 1%. This fits.