Open Thread Wednesday

Police and mask-wearing? What’s up with that??

Mayor Bill appears on WNYC every Friday and fields questions from a sharp on-air host and a handful of listeners. He went to great pains last Friday to separate the many endorsements Trump has gotten from “people in law enforcement” from what he claims is neutrality by his appointed Police Commissioner.

Hmph, in a word – by way of a response to that.

But my concern is the VERY BAD image & reality of NYC Police seldom, if ever, wearing masks. They come into close contact with each other and at least tens of thousands of New Yorkers daily. With the City laser focused on avoiding or minimizing a winter resurgence of Covid, how does that make sense?

If – and to me the operative word is WHEN – there is a lack of discipline with a police department, democracy! is imperiled.

If a policeman came to the meeting I think may still begin each shift in sneakers … or without a gun or a badge, SURELY, s/he would be reprimanded and NOT be “out there” outfitted that way.

So, why can’t the Mayor send down a clear directive that masks are NOT OPTIONAL?!

And yes, I have an inkling as to why that is, but it gets increasingly unacceptable.

Demonstrators – everyone BUT the police seems to agree that peaceful protest is emblematic of democracy – should not have to worry more about getting infected than getting maced or clubbed.

And when the NYPD is charged with ENFORCING the 2 or 3 things we know are most likely to minimize outbreaks … and they issue tickets to people not wearing masks when they themselves are not wearing masks, how “sick” is that?!

Does anyone believe that those fines will ever be paid? If 3% testing positive shuts down schools … and probably brings us close to a tipping point, all this needs to be something other than part of the Mayor-Governor ongoing food fight.

The Governor has it right, even if it’s both a cheap shot and WAY beyond the abilities of our current inept Mayor – without enforcement, we’re fighting both the disease and a large number of fellow citizens – people who use mass transit, shop and – for whatever reason – seem not to be willing to do things that keep their loved ones & the rest of their fellow New Yorkers safe.

Just as millions were convinced by the President’s EXAMPLE that masks weren’t necessary, millions more have to be influenced by “law enforcement’s” very poor “modeling.” I know it’s hot in the US South (and NYC in the summer), but now and here – with Police very much part of making voting “safe” – it’s sheer anarchy!

Clark and Willow. Last year the house had Spiderman crawling up the walls.

Maggie,
Brooklyn Heights enthusiastically participates in Halloween decorations like no other community. The attached film used as its subject matter the Halloween decorations displayed throughout the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood by residents a few years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZCsSt_qYL8

And here’s the intersection, two years later, on September 14th, 1905:
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1e763dcbf62ce12b26faba3be15eaa8bfb7dd4485f515be207bffbe2b3e38f81.jpg

Can someone please ban leaf blowers from NYC? — and, while you’re at it, get off my lawn!

Look at the baby trees! I wonder if any of the ones there today are the same.

I’m trying to place this view. I assume that steeple the belongs to Our Lady of Lebanon Church, and was knocked down at some point. And the house on the right is where the post-war apartment building now stands.

Interesting. There’s a picture of the church here with the steeple. It looks like it had two spires originally, with a shorter one to the left of the front entrance. http://ololc.org/about.html

Jeremy, you are an encyclopedic marvel. You are truly one of my favorite people on the planet. No doubt if I was back in grammar school, I would make a point of sitting next to you, hoping that osmosis would do its thing and assimilate our brains.

The Halstead Real Estate office on Montague in the former Pic-a-Deli/Housing Works/Fish’s Eddie/etc. store closed up within the last day or so.

An article on the building also ran in YIMBY (not behind a Paywall):

https://tinyurl.com/y5utceqk

I used to sit, talk and drink “branch water” with Pete on the stoop of her home on Willow St where she grew up. She always called it the Towers Hotel, and when I asked if it was called “Leverich Towers” she said she’d never heard the name.

She had her debut at the hotel, and she said she descended a grand staircase in the ballroom with “a beau on each arm, as back then you had to have two beaus as a debutante.”

The JWs later held a banquet at the building when they owned it, which she attended. She said she wept when she saw that the grand staircase had been removed during JW renovations.

I hope some of the grandeur has been restored for her sake. If anyone can find a picture of the ballroom or staircase, I would love to see it.

Pete had a pretty good memory. (Miss her on the stoop!)

This building was announced as the “Leverich Towers Hotel” in 1925, and used that name after opening in 1927. The Leverichs were an old Dutch Brooklyn family who moved into real estate development in the roaring 1920s. But they lavishly overspent on this property and others, and lost the hotel to bankruptcy even before the Depression hit. A new owner took off the tainted Leverich name from the property in the early 1930s. From then on it was just called the “Towers Hotel” (notwithstanding some lingering Leverich references in a few 1930s newspaper articles), until the Jehovah’s Witnesses bought it in the 1970s. So, the name “Leverich Towers Hotel” often appears in guidebooks because that was the opening name, but Pete was correct that no one in living memory actually called it that.