Protests in N.Y.C.: Latest Updates

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Weather: Mostly cloudy, with a high in the mid-70s.

Alternate-side parking: Suspended through Sunday.


New York City reached an 11 p.m. curfew on Monday as widespread looting erupted in the central business district of Manhattan, long a symbol of the city’s prominence, with shattered glass and smashed storefronts on several blocks.

Looters tried to ransack some of the city’s best-known retailers, including the Macy’s flagship store in Herald Square and luxury stores along Fifth Avenue.

Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged that the curfew, which had been announced only several hours before it was to begin, had failed to quell the criminal violence that marred the otherwise peaceful protests of previous nights. As a result, he said, a curfew would be imposed again on Tuesday, this time starting at 8 p.m.

There were few reports of clashes between the authorities and those who had assembled to rally against police brutality and racism, in response to the death of George Floyd, a black man, in the custody of Minneapolis police officers last week. The crowds had mostly dispersed by 11 p.m., although some protesters continued to walk the streets in Manhattan and near the Barclays Center.

Yet even after the curfew began, the violence it was meant to stop continued in sections of the Bronx, where there were reports of fires and looting, SoHo and, to a lesser degree than on previous nights, in Midtown.

Earlier Monday, demonstrators had rallied peacefully across the five boroughs.

As the protests began to take shape in the Bay Ridge, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn and several Manhattan neighborhoods, demonstrators and observers said they had never witnessed expressions of grief and anger of such magnitude.

“People are not going to go home until they get what they want,” Mike Tucker, a 54-year old Bronx resident whose 21-year-old son, Stephonne Crawford, was fatally shot by the police in 2005 in Brooklyn.

But Mr. Tucker, who spoke on the steps of Restoration Plaza in Bedford-Stuyvesant, also denounced the violence and looting that have punctuated the protests in New York.

[Get the latest news and updates on the protests in the New York region.]

Terence A. Monahan, the Police Department’s chief of department and the city’s highest-ranking uniformed officer, took a knee and locked arms with protesters outside Washington Square Park on Monday as another night of protests began in earnest.

A photo of Chief Monahan making the symbolic gesture as a show of solidarity with protesters and their cause was published by Gothamist. The chief’s move came after he intervened to defuse a tense standoff between the police and demonstrators, a separate video posted on Twitter by a reporter for CBS showed.

“This has got to end — we all know Minnesota was wrong,” Chief Monahan says in the video, in reference to Mr. Floyd’s death. “There is not a police officer over here that thinks Minnesota was justified. We stand with you on that.”

“But this is our city — our city!” he continued. “Do not let people who are not from this city have you come here and screw up your city! We cannot be fighting. We have to live here. This is our home.”

[New York’s days of protest: What it looked like from the streets.]

Hundreds of protesters gathered on Monday for a vigil at the Stonewall Inn in Manhattan, the scene of anti-police rioting in 1969 that is widely regarded as a major turning point in the modern gay-rights movement

The Virus Ravaged Parents at One School. They Found a Way to Fight Back.

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A Greenpoint woman is making masks that could help the hard-of-hearing. [Brooklyn Paper]

Progressive opposition to Representative Eliot Engel, a Democrat whose district includes parts of the Bronx and Westchester, is consolidating. [NY1]

A spike in drug overdose deaths on Long Island is linked to the coronavirus, according to law enforcement and health officials. [Newsday]


The Times’s Azi Paybarah writes:

Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada is an artist whose work fits more easily on a parking lot than inside a museum.

In 2008, Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada honored Senator Barack Obama with a mural spanning nearly 2.5 acres of beachfront in Spain. Six years later he used six acres of the Mall in Washington to construct a composite image of a young man that an art and architecture critic at The Washington Post said “gives the uncanny impression of looking straight at you.”

Now, the landscape artist is looking to show his appreciation for the health care workers who have died from the coronavirus: He has created a piece on a lot at the Queens Museum in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

There, a 20,000-square-foot mural will show a doctor with a face mask and a head covering. The eyes are based on those of Dr. Ydelfonso Decoo, who practiced medicine in Upper Manhattan for decades and died in March after contracting the virus.

On Facebook, Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada said he chose Dr. Decoo as a model to honor him and to bring attention to the impact the virus has had on neighborhoods with large numbers of black, Latino and poor residents. Those areas have the highest death rates from the virus, according to both city and state data.

The mural, which was completed last week, was commissioned by SOMOS Community Care, a health network that works mostly with immigrants and Latinos.

Groups that helped organize the piece include Make the Road, a progressive advocacy organization; and El Museo del Barrio, which focuses on Puerto Rican and Latin American culture in the United States.

Henry R. Munoz, a founder of SOMOS, said his admiration of Mr. Rodríguez-Gerada’s work crystallized into plans for the mural about three weeks ago. The project, he said, was “an attempt to put a face on the pandemic.”

It’s Tuesday — look at the big picture.


Dear Diary:

An exchange overheard on the Upper West Side:

“I want a dog that doesn’t know it’s cute,” one woman said to another.

— Sara Latta


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