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    Google to Spend $2.1 Billion on Manhattan Office Building

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    The technology giant has built a sprawling campus on the West Side of Manhattan and has 12,000 employees in the city.Google announced on Tuesday that it would spend $2.1 billion to buy a sprawling Manhattan office building on the Hudson River waterfront, paying one of the largest prices in recent years for an office building in the United States and providing a jolt of optimism to a real estate industry lashed by the pandemic.The transaction comes during a precarious period for New York City’s office market, the largest in the country, as the swift embrace of remote work and the shedding of office space have presented the most serious threat to the industry in decades.While Manhattan has a glut of office space available for lease, setting record vacancy levels during the pandemic, the four firms that make up so-called Big Tech — Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook — have staked a bullish position on the future of New York.The companies have rapidly increased their operations and work force, one of the few bright spots for New York, which has been hit harder by the pandemic’s economic toll than any other major American city.Google was already leasing but not yet occupying the 1.3 million-square-foot property, a former freight terminal near the Holland Tunnel known as St. John’s Terminal that is being renovated and expanded. The company has 12,000 corporate employees in New York City — its largest satellite offices outside its California headquarters — and said on Tuesday that it planned to hire another 2,000 workers in the city in the coming years.“New York’s energy, creativity and world-class talent are what keep us rooted here and why we’re deepening our commitment with plans to purchase St. John’s Terminal,” said Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer at Google and its parent company, Alphabet. “We look forward to continuing to grow along with this remarkable, diverse city.”Collectively, the four tech giants employ more than 22,000 people in their Manhattan offices. But their workers are unlikely to work five days a week in the office again anytime soon. Many tech companies have said they will allow employees to work remotely in a hybrid arrangement even after the pandemic ends. Google recently postponed its return-to-office plans to early 2022 because of the highly contagious Delta variant.The speed with which the economy recovers in New York City, especially Manhattan, could hinge on office buildings. Before the pandemic, they drew a million workers every day, and those workers’ spending on everything from morning coffee to business lunches to after-work Broadway shows supported thousands of businesses. The absence of those commuters has led many stores and restaurants to close in Manhattan.Companies have embraced remote work during the pandemic in ways they never had before, deciding that employees would be able to continue to work from home for some or all of the week after the pandemic eventually ends and even hiring new employees who plan to stay away from the office indefinitely.As a result, large employers like Condé Nast and JPMorgan Chase have relinquished chunks of office space, contributing to nearly 19 percent of Manhattan offices being available for rent, according to Newmark, a real estate services firm, nearly double the average rate over the last decade.About 28 percent of office workers in the New York City region, which includes parts of New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, had returned to the office as of last week, more than double the rate from a few months ago, according to Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks employee card swipes in office buildings. The nationwide average was 33.6 percent, Kastle said.Kate Lister, the president of Global Workplace Analytics, a consulting firm advising companies on their return-to-office policies, said that hybrid work would remain a permanent feature of work culture after the pandemic.Office space is not going to disappear, but, Ms. Lister added, “The total space will come down.”Still, elected officials in New York sought to cast Google’s announcement as a sign of the city’s rebound.“This announcement from Google is yet another proof point that New York’s economy is recovering and rebuilding,” Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We are creating jobs, investing in emerging industries, lifting up New Yorkers, and together, we are writing our comeback story.”Mayor Bill de Blasio called the deal “a historic investment in New York City.” The transaction was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.When the St. John’s building opens after construction is finished in mid-2023, Google will have more than 3.1 million square feet of office space in New York, making it one of the largest leaseholders in the city.Google’s New York presence began in 2000 with a single employee in sales who worked out of a Starbucks. The company sealed its commitment to the city in 2010 with the $1.8 billion purchase of a 15-story building in Chelsea.Over the past decade, Google has rapidly increased its work force in Manhattan, hiring young engineers from the region’s universities, attracting tech workers who do not want to live in Silicon Valley and expanding its marketing and sales departments. The company has added 5,000 employees in New York since late 2018.The terminal building that will be home to Google’s new office is in Hudson Square, a neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan between TriBeCa, Greenwich Village and SoHo. Many creative, media and tech companies have offices there, including the website builder Squarespace and the eyewear company Warby Parker. Disney has also selected the neighborhood as the site of the new headquarters for its New York office.In addition to businesses, the area has a growing residential population, after a rezoning in 2013 led to a boom in the development of new high-rise and condo buildings.In recent years, Google’s main rivals, notably Amazon and Facebook, have also invested heavily in New York City, turning a swath of the West Side, from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, into a thriving tech corridor.Facebook has acquired more than 2.2 million square feet of office space in Manhattan, most of it signed just before or during the pandemic, and has 4,000 employees in the city. Amazon, whose corporate offices are largely clustered near its competitors on the West Side of Manhattan, also bought the former Lord & Taylor building on Fifth Avenue for $1.5 billion in March 2020.And while the tech industry has been among the most amenable to remote work, the companies are still gobbling up real estate, a potential sign of their hiring pace and of a reimagining of office space.Tom Wright, president of the Regional Plan Association, a research and advocacy group, said that even though tech employees may only come into the office a few times a week, they may want more space between desks or bigger conference rooms. In particular, he said, offices need to figure out how to accommodate hybrid meetings in which some participants are in person while others are videoconferencing in from home.“During the pandemic, people assumed an across-the-board reduction in activity and demand for office space when actually it’s a much more complex equation,” Mr. Wright said.The growing footprint of Google and other tech giants in New York reflects their increasing importance to the city’s economy. Economists expect the tech sector to be a primary engine for job growth after the pandemic.In the first eight months of the pandemic, there were more job openings in technology roles than in any other occupation in New York City, according to an analysis of job postings by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group. During that period, demand for tech workers was more than double that for finance.The tech sector has become New York City’s most reliable source of new middle- and high-wage jobs, researchers said, with average wages in tech jobs 49 percent higher than the average private-sector wage.But the presence of tech giants in the city has also been a source of tension, most notably in 2019, when Amazon abandoned plans to build a new corporate campus with 25,000 employees in Queens after facing opposition from progressive activists, elected officials and union leaders.They were angered chiefly by billions of dollars in government tax breaks and incentives offered to Amazon as a lure.Less than a year later, Amazon signed a lease for office space in Midtown Manhattan near the Hudson Yards development, the start of a multiyear expansion in New York City.Julie Samuels, the executive director of Tech:NYC, an advocacy group for the tech industry, said that despite the collapse of the Amazon deal in 2019, tech companies are still drawn to New York City because of its concentration of diverse tech talent.“I have not heard of another company either pulling back on plans to be here or deciding not to come here because of Amazon,” Ms. Samuels said. “We were worried about that.” More

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    800,000 New Yorkers Just Lost Federal Unemployment Benefits

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    Many pandemic-era federal programs expired on Sunday, leaving jobless New Yorkers with more modest state unemployment benefits, or no aid at all.From the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, New York City has been pummeled economically unlike any other large American city, as a sustained recovery has failed to take root and hundreds of thousands of workers have yet to find full-time jobs.On Sunday, the city, like other communities nationwide, was hit with another blow: The package of pandemic-related federal unemployment benefits, which has kept families afloat for 17 months, expired.In short order, roughly $463 million in weekly unemployment assistance for New York City residents is ending, threatening to upend the city’s fledgling economic rebound and slashing the only source of income for some to pay rent and buy groceries in a city rife with inequality. About 10 percent of the city’s population, or about 800,000 people, will have federal aid eliminated, though many will continue receiving state benefits.The benefits were the sole income for the many self-employed workers and contract employees whose jobs are central to the city’s economy and vibrancy — taxi drivers, artists and hairdressers, among many others — and who do not qualify for regular unemployment benefits. “To just cut people off, it’s ridiculous and it’s unethical and it’s evil,” said Travis Curry, 34, a freelance photographer who will lose all his assistance, about $482 a week. “If we can’t buy food or go to local businesses because we don’t have money to live in New York, how will New York come back?”Federal officials say that more Americans are ready to return to work, and Republican lawmakers and small business owners have blamed the benefits for discouraging people from working at a time when there are a record number of job openings.In recent weeks, President Biden has said that states like New York with high unemployment rates could turn to leftover federal pandemic aid to extend benefits after his administration decided not to ask Congress to authorize an extension. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat who last week signed a new moratorium on evictions after the Supreme Court ended federal protections, said the state could not afford to extend the benefits on its own and would need the federal government to provide additional money. A spokesman for Mayor Bill de Blasio did not respond to requests for comment.Gov. Kathy Hochul said the state could not afford to keep financing unemployment assistance without additional federal aid.Stephanie Keith for The New York TimesThe expiring of unemployment benefits ends a period of extraordinary federal intervention to prop up the economy over the past year and a half as the virus has ravaged the country, claiming the lives of 649,000 people and leaving millions of laid-off workers struggling to secure new jobs. .css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}The federal programs supplemented standard and far more modest state unemployment benefits. New York City was the first major city in the United States to be hit hard by the pandemic, decimating industries almost overnight that underpinned the city’s economy, from tourism to hospitality to office buildings. Economists have projected that New York City may not fully regain all its pandemic job losses until 2024.The federal assistance provided new streams of financial aid beyond regular unemployment payments, which are distributed by states. Jobless Americans received a $600 per week supplement, which was later reduced under Mr. Biden to $300 per week. Unemployment benefits were also offered to contract workers and the self-employed, who under normal circumstances do not qualify for assistance. Payments were extended beyond the 26 weeks offered by most states.The end of the $300 federal supplement means those who still qualify for regular benefits through New York State will lose about half of their weekly assistance.Since the jobless programs rolled out in April 2020, New York City residents have collected about $53.5 billion in unemployment aid, primarily among lower-paid workers in the service, hospitality and arts industries, according to a recent report by the economist James Parrott of the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. The recipients also tended to be people of color, who have borne the brunt of the pandemic’s economic and health toll. That includes Ericka Tircio, who lost her job cleaning a 40-story office building in Manhattan’s Financial District in March 2020 and contracted the disease around the same time. She has collected assistance since then, but it will be reduced by about $300 per week. Ms. Tircio, an immigrant from Ecuador who has a 6-year-old son, said her company told her recently that she might be asked to return to work in the coming months.“I’m praying to God that they call me back,” Ms. Tircio, who speaks Spanish, said through a translator. “There are moments when I’ve waited so long that I feel myself falling into a depression.”Ms. Tircio is a member of 32BJ SEIU, a local chapter of the Service Employees International Union, whose president, Kyle Bragg, said thousands of its members had been laid off during the pandemic.“Workers should not be left behind to fend for themselves during the worst crisis in a century,” Mr. Bragg said.In recent months, about half the states elected to end their pandemic-related benefits long before the expiration this weekend, a deadline set by the federal government when a vigorous recovery appeared to be on the horizon. In states led by Republican governors, elected officials said that the assistance stymied economic growth and resulted in labor shortages; however, the job growth in those states has not been substantially different than in states that kept the programs.In New York, business leaders have advocated for the state to end the pandemic unemployment benefits, arguing that they hurt small businesses struggling to hire workers. Thomas Grech, president of the Queens Chamber of Commerce, said several job fairs he hosted over the summer were poorly attended.“People were disincentivized to go to work,” Mr. Grech said. “They’re making more money sitting at home. It’s a classic case of good intentions gone bad.”Mr. Grech said that raising wages as a way to lure workers, as some labor economists and advocates have recommended, was unrealistic for some restaurants “unless you want to spend $30 or $40 for a burger.”Elected officials in New York have argued that unemployment benefits helped pump money directly into the economy.“People who receive emergency unemployment assistance are going to turn around and spend that money, and that money is helpful to other people who are also struggling to get things back to normal,” said State Senator Brian Kavanagh, a Democrat who represents Lower Manhattan.The expiration of the benefits was supposed to coincide with a grand reopening of sorts for New York, as many companies announced during an early summer dip in virus cases that workers would be called back to the office in September. But the Delta variant has fueled a resurgence of the virus, postponing any hope that Manhattan’s office buildings would soon refill. Months of moderate job gains stalled over the summer and the city’s unemployment rate, 10.2 percent, increased slightly in July and is nearly double the national average.Bill Wilkins, who oversees economic development for the Local Development Corporation of East New York in Brooklyn, said unemployment and other benefits helped sustain his neighborhood, which has long suffered from high joblessness. But as the pandemic recedes from its peak, he said it was also “incumbent for individuals to be more self-reliant.”The pandemic exposed the significant skills gap in New York City, he said, resulting in large numbers of unemployed workers who do not qualify for job openings that require a college degree, such as high-paying jobs in the tech sector.“If you want a job right now, you have a job,” Mr. Wilkins said, referring to lower-paying openings at many mom-and-pop shops. “The problem is, is that job a sustainable wage? You want the higher-paying jobs, but you have to have the requisite skills that demand that type of salary.”Alex Weisman, an actor, registered for unemployment benefits for the first time after the pandemic shut down Broadway, where he had been in the ensemble for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” The checks, which ranged from about $800 to $1,100 a week, allowed him to keep paying rent for his apartment in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.When the pandemic shut down Broadway, including “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” it left Alex Weisman, an actor in the show’s ensemble, jobless and reliant on supplemental federal unemployment assistance.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Weisman, 34, submits audition videos every week, hoping for steady work. Earlier this year, he booked a television job for five weeks, which allowed him to briefly go off unemployment benefits.As his benefits run out, he is considering connecting with a temp agency to find work. The last time he had a job outside acting was as a barista in 2013.“I’m going to have to get an entry-level position somewhere,” Mr. Weisman said. “Because I succeeded in the thing that I trained in and wanted to do, I have absolutely nothing to offer any other industry. It’s scary.”Mohammad Kashem, who worked for nearly two decades as a taxi driver, had similar difficulties switching industries. Before the pandemic, a bank had seized his taxi medallion after he struggled to repay his loans amid a sharp drop in yellow cab ridership. Mr. Kashem, an immigrant from Bangladesh who lives in Brooklyn, worked as a postal carrier during the pandemic but quit after one month, saying he was unaccustomed to delivering mail through rain and snow. His family has been relying on $700 a week in unemployment benefits. He and his wife could not maintain jobs during the pandemic because of health issues, he said, noting that they both contracted the coronavirus and have high blood pressure and diabetes.When the unemployment benefits expire, his wife may try finding a job as a babysitter. Mr. Kashem, 50, has been wracked with anxiety about how he will pay for rent and school supplies for his three children.“I was driving taxi many, many years,” Mr. Kashem said. “I’m not used to another job.” More

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    New York City’s Economy Is Dealt a New Blow by the Delta Variant

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    For New York City and its trillion-dollar economy, September was supposed to mark a return to normal, a moment when Broadway theaters reopened, stores and restaurants hummed, and tourists and office workers again filled the streets.But that long-awaited milestone has been upended by the Delta variant of the coronavirus. One big company after another has postponed plans to come back to Manhattan’s soaring towers. Trade shows have been canceled. Some small businesses have had orders evaporate.It is a setback for a city that has lagged behind the rest of the country in its economic recovery, with a 10.5 percent unemployment rate that is nearly twice the national average. Now, rather than seeing the fuller rebound it was counting on, New York is facing fresh challenges.“The Delta variant is a meaningful threat to the city’s recovery,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “This is not going to be easy. It’s going to be a long time before New York City gets its economic groove back.”Covid-19 cases have risen sharply in the city since early July, reaching the highest level since April. Hospitalizations have not risen as greatly, and the death rate has remained low. The situation is worrisome enough, however, that the city has begun requiring patrons and employees of bars, restaurants, gyms and indoor entertainment venues to show proof of vaccination — a development unforeseen when the summer began.Staff members checking the vaccination status of patrons at the Beacon Theater.The city has established a vaccination mandate for some indoor establishments. Beginning Sept. 13, it will fine businesses that do not comply. There are signs of hope, or at least determination. Broadway shows, a major tourist magnet, are on track for a September reopening, as is in-person instruction in city schools, which will free some caregivers to return to the work force. But even as the city sponsored an official Homecoming Week, capped by a concert on Saturday in Central Park that was cut short by lightning, cancellations of trade shows and other big events have mounted.Regaining momentum could be painfully slow. James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School, expects the city to add 20,000 to 30,000 jobs a month in the fall, instead of 40,000 to 50,000, because of Delta.Overall employment remains more than half a million jobs below where it was before the pandemic, with steep losses persisting in the leisure and hospitality industries and in other blue-collar fields. Recouping those service jobs depends in part on the return of white-collar workers who have worked remotely — and have even left the city.Many companies had aimed to bring employees back to the office shortly after Labor Day, at least part-time. But those plans have been scrapped. Facebook, which employs 4,000 people in New York, has put off a return until January, while the financial giants BlackRock and Wells Fargo are now planning a return in October.“Data, not dates, is what drives our approach for returning to the office,” Facebook said in a statement. “We continue to monitor the situation and work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s safety.”Boston Properties, which owns nearly 12 million square feet of space in the New York region, said about 40 percent of prepandemic occupants had returned to its buildings earlier in the summer, based on lobby badge swipes. In August, amid Delta’s rise and vacation getaways, that figure had dipped to around 30 percent, said Owen Thomas, the company’s chief executive.“I think the return to the office is a ‘when’ question, not an ‘if’ question,” he said. “Delta is affecting the when.”There are some “if” questions nonetheless. As remote work extends well into a second year, and as much of the contact between professionals and clients continues to be conducted online, it is less clear whether some suburban workers will ever return to the city and to their sometimes-arduous commutes.As companies put off bringing employees back to offices, service businesses that cater to office workers have suffered.An empty plaza in Midtown Manhattan.A shuttered newsstand.As remote work extends well into a second year, the eventual return of some suburbanites to Manhattan’s office towers becomes more uncertain.Greenberg Traurig, a global law firm, was planning to move into four floors of a new building near Grand Central Terminal in October. But many of Greenberg’s lawyers and investor clients relocated to Long Island during the pandemic, prompting the firm to reduce its office space in Midtown to three floors. It plans to open two new offices on Long Island, including one in Bridgehampton.“For me, this is a no-brainer,” said Richard Rosenbaum, the executive chairman. “We accept that this is likely a permanent change in the way people work.”At the same time, corporate get-togethers are in renewed jeopardy. Mr. Zandi, the Moody’s economist, had two in-person speaking engagements set for September and October, but they were recently turned into remote events.“People are nervous about the variant,” he said. “At the very least, it dents New York’s recovery, and if cases continue to mount, then it will delay the recovery.”The on-again, off-again situation among big companies, as well as for events like weddings and parties, has been destabilizing for businesses that depend on them.Patrick Hall, a co-owner of Elan Flowers in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, has been dealing with a flurry of changes as clients have grown more skittish about the virus.Soon-to-be brides are cutting their guest lists in half and changing venues at the last minute. One client, who has not yet paid a deposit, had been emailing Mr. Hall about a nonprofit organization’s gala in October for 300 people and recently went silent.Some large companies had asked Mr. Hall to prepare flowers for return-to-office parties in the fall, but Mr. Hall wonders whether he can bank on those. He had planned to expand his staff of seven people to handle an increase in business in September but is now unsure about how many employees to hire.“I’m trying to hang on and not lose it,” Mr. Hall said. “I need these larger events in September for my business to survive.”New York’s huge travel and leisure industry is also having an uneven recovery.More than any other American city, New York counts on international tourists. So the Biden administration’s decision in late July to continue barring entry to visitors from Europe and several other parts of the world was a blow.“It’s just reinforcing that the recovery isn’t going to happen in a straight line,” said Fred Dixon, the chief executive of NYC & Company, the city’s tourism promotion agency.Having written off the bulk of foreign tourism in August, when New York is usually awash with European vacationers, tourism industry officials fear that the Delta variant could keep visitors away during the crucial holiday season, too.New York’s travel and leisure industry is experiencing an uneven recovery, punctuated by the ups and downs of virus cases.Tourism officials fear that the Delta variant could keep visitors away during the usually bustling holiday season.Domestic travelers have returned to New York in rising numbers, Mr. Dixon said — foot traffic in Times Square has been above 200,000 a day, higher than in May and June — but they do not stay as long or spend as much as overseas tourists.At the Loews Regency, a Park Avenue hotel known as a gathering spot for local power brokers and tourists alike, occupancy has been around 75 percent, according to Jonathan M. Tisch, the chief executive of Loews Hotels. But getting to the full-occupancy levels of late 2019 and early 2020, he said, would require a return of business travelers and especially international tourists.“If you could tell me the impact of the Delta variant, I could tell you the occupancy for the rest of the year,” Mr. Tisch said. “It’s a great unknown.”The Javits Convention Center was preparing to host its first trade show in more than a year when the organizers of the New York International Auto Show said in early August they were calling off their 10-day event there. A week later, the Specialty Food Association announced that its annual Fancy Food Show, scheduled for late September at Javits, would not take place.“Given the current significant national upswing in Covid-19 cases due to the Delta variant, we believe that holding a large indoor event and protecting the general safety of all show participants will be nearly impossible,” the food show’s organizers said.New York City’s largest hotel, the 2,000-room Hilton in Midtown, began taking reservations with a plan to reopen in August. But the hotel’s managers canceled those bookings and tentatively reset the reopening for Sept. 1.Still, some businesses have plowed ahead. Genting Group, a Malaysian operator of casinos, opened a 400-room Hyatt Regency hotel at its Resorts World gambling parlor near Kennedy International Airport in early August.After spending $400 million and three years getting the hotel built, the company did not want to wait any longer to open it, said Bob DeSalvio, the president of Genting Americas East.“We understand that it’s going to take a while for travel to fully ramp back up,” he said, so the hotel was staffed for 50 percent occupancy. But there clearly was pent-up demand, because the hotel’s first weekend was sold out, Mr. DeSalvio said.Caroline Hirsch, the owner of Carolines on Broadway, has not canceled any shows at her comedy club and is moving forward with the New York Comedy Festival, which is scheduled to begin on Nov. 8 and feature more than 100 shows across the city.But this month, she noticed for the first time since reopening in May that some people who bought tickets for the club did not show up.“We were off to a great start,” Ms. Hirsch said. “We thought we were going to be over this hump. Now there’s another hump. We’re all up in the air again.”Ms. Hirsch hopes that the city’s new executive order requiring proof of at least one vaccination to enter many indoor establishments will make audience members more comfortable. The mandate went into effect on Tuesday, and on Sept. 13 the city will begin fining businesses that fail to comply.Other business owners are less sanguine about the mandate; it has produced at least one legal challenge. And as September approaches, the prospect of business as usual, which seemed tantalizingly close a few months ago, is proving elusive.At the Shambhala Yoga & Dance Center in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, a wave of students signed up after in-person classes resumed in late April, when vaccination efforts were in full swing. But in recent days, attendance has ebbed and flowed with news of the Delta variant’s outbreak, said Deanna Green, Shambhala’s owner.“Once we saw uncertainty around the vaccines and the Delta variant, I have noticed a little bit of a lull,” Ms. Green said. Some yoga classes that typically had 10 students dropped last week to six or seven, she said.“We’re really dependent on a steady flow of people coming through the doors,” she said. “I wish there was more of a level of certainty.”Eduardo Porter More

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    As New York Reopens, It Looks for Culture to Lead the Way

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    Broadway is planning to start performances of at least three dozen shows before the end of the year, but producers do not know if there will be enough tourists — who typically make up two-thirds of the audience — to support all of them.The Metropolitan Opera is planning a September return, but only if its musicians agree to pay cuts.And New York’s vaunted nightlife scene — the dance clubs and live venues that give the city its reputation for never sleeping — has been stymied by the slow, glitchy rollout of a federal aid program that mistakenly declared some of the city’s best-known nightclub impresarios to be dead.The return of arts and entertainment is crucial to New York’s economy, and not just because it is a major industry that employed some 93,500 people before the pandemic and paid them $7.4 billion in wages, according to the state comptroller’s office. Culture is also part of the lifeblood of New York — a magnet for visitors and residents alike that will play a key role if the city is to remain vital in an era when shops are battling e-commerce, the ease of remote work has businesses rethinking the need to stay in central business districts and the exurbs are booming.“What is a city without social, cultural and creative synergies?” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo asked earlier this year in an address on the importance of the arts to the city’s recovery. “New York City is not New York without Broadway. And with Zoom, many people have learned they can do business from anywhere. Compound this situation with growing crime and homelessness and we have a national urban crisis.”When “Springsteen on Broadway” opened its doors again in June, the fans flocked back. George Etheredge for The New York TimesAnd Mayor Bill de Blasio — who could seem indifferent to the arts earlier in his tenure — has become a cultural cheerleader in the waning days of his administration, starting a $25 million program to put artists back to work, creating a Broadway vaccination site for theater industry workers and planning a “homecoming concert” in Central Park next month featuring Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson and Paul Simon to herald the city’s return.Eli Dvorkin, editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, said, “The way I look at it, there is not going to be a strong recovery for New York City without the performing arts’ leading the way.” He added, “People gravitate here because of the city’s cultural life.”There are signs of hope everywhere, as vaccinated New Yorkers re-emerge this summer. Destinations like the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum are crowded again, although timed reservations are still required. Bruce Springsteen is playing to sold-out crowds on Broadway and Foo Fighters brought rock back to Madison Square Garden.Shakespeare in the Park and the Classical Theater of Harlem are staging contemporary adaptations of classic plays in city parks, the Park Avenue Armory, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and a number of commercial Off Broadway theaters have been presenting productions indoors, and a new outdoor amphitheater is drawing crowds for shows on Little Island, the new Hudson River venue.Haley Gibbs, 25, an administrative aide who lives in Brooklyn, said she felt the city’s pulse returning as she waited to attend “Drunk Shakespeare,” an Off Off Broadway fixture that has resumed performances in Midtown.“I feel like it’s our soul that’s been given back to us, in a way,” Gibbs said, “which is super dramatic, but it is kind of like that.”But some of the greatest tests for the city’s cultural scene lie ahead.Hunkering down — cutting staff, slashing programming — turned out to be a brutal but effective survival strategy. Arts workers faced record unemployment, and some have yet to return to work, but many businesses and organizations were able to slash expenses and wait until it was safe to reopen. Now that it’s time to start hiring and spending again, many cultural leaders are worried: Can they thrive with fewer tourists and commuters? How much will safety protocols cost? Will the donors who stepped up during the emergency stick around for a less glamorous period of rebuilding?“Next year may prove to be our most financially challenging,” said Bernie Telsey, one of the three artistic directors at MCC Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit. “In many ways, it’s like a start-up now — it’s not just turning the lights on. Everything is a little uncertain. It’s like starting all over again.”The fall season is shaping up to be the big test. “Springsteen on Broadway” began last month, but the rest of Broadway has yet to resume: The first post-shutdown play, a drama about two existentially trapped Black men called “Pass Over,” is to start performances Aug. 4, while the first musicals are aiming for September, starting with “Hadestown” and “Waitress,” followed by war horses that include “The Lion King,” “Chicago,” “Wicked” and “Hamilton.”Many of Broadway’s biggest hits will reopen in September.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe looming question is whether there will be enough theatergoers to support all those shows. Although there have been signs that some visitors are returning to the city, tourism is not expected to rebound to its prepandemic levels for four years. So some of the returning Broadway shows will initially start with reduced schedules — performing fewer than the customary eight shows a week — as producers gauge ticket demand.And “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a big-budget, Tony-winning play that was staged in two parts before the pandemic, will be cut down to a single show when it returns to Broadway on Nov. 12; its producers cited “the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”“What we need to do, which has never been done before, is open all of Broadway over a single season,” said Tali Pelman, the lead producer of “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Safety protocols have been changing rapidly, as more people get vaccinated, but there is still apprehension about moving too fast. In Australia, reopened shows have periodically been halted by lockdowns, while in England, several shows have been forced to cancel performances to comply with isolation protocols that some view as overly restrictive.“On a fundamental level, our health is at stake,” said Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” which is planning to resume performances on Broadway on Sept. 14. “You get this wrong, and we open too soon, and then we re-spike and we close again — that’s almost unthinkable.”Some presenters worry that, with fewer tourists, arts organizations will be battling one another to win the attention of New Yorkers and people from the region.The tourism drawn by Broadway is an essential part of the restaurant and bar economy in Midtown.George Etheredge for The New York TimesWill audiences return in the same numbers as prior to the pandemic is a question that producers are pondering. George Etheredge for The New York Times“There’s going to be a lot of competition for a smaller audience at the beginning, and that’s scary,” said Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout Theater Company, a nonprofit that operates three theaters on Broadway and two Off Broadway.Another looming challenge: concerns about public safety. Bystanders were struck by stray bullets during shooting incidents in Times Square in May and June, prompting Mayor de Blasio to promise additional officers to protect and reassure the public in that tourist-and-theater-dense neighborhood.The city’s tourism organization, NYC & Company, has developed a $30 million marketing campaign to draw visitors back to the city. The Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, is planning its own campaign. The Tony Awards are planning a fall special on CBS that will focus on performances in an effort to boost ticket sales. And comeback come-ons are finding their way into advertising: “We’ve been waiting for you,” “Wicked” declares in a direct mail piece.The economic stakes for the city are high. Broadway shows give work to actors and singers and dancers and ushers, but also, indirectly, to waiters and bartenders and hotel clerks and taxi drivers, who then go on to spend a portion of their paychecks on goods and services. The Broadway League says that during the 2018-2019 season Broadway generated $14.7 billion in economic activity and supported 96,900 jobs, when factoring in the direct and indirect spending of tourists who cited Broadway as a major reason for visiting the city.“We’ve pushed through a really tough time, and now you have this new variant, which is kind of scary, but I still hope we’re on the right track,” said Shane Hathaway, the co-owner of Hold Fast, a Restaurant Row bar and eatery whose website asks “Do you miss the Performing Arts?? So do we!!” “We’re already seeing a lot more tourists than last year,” Hathaway said, “and my hope is that we continue.”The Metropolitan Museum of Art on a  Saturday in July. It reopened last August on a reduced schedule and officials there say the visitor count has dropped.George Etheredge for The New York TimesAt the tourist-dependent Met Museum, attendance is back, but not all the way: it’s now open five days a week, and has drawn 10,000 people many days, while before the pandemic it was open seven days a week and averaged 14,000 daily visitors. Plus: more of the visitors now are local, and they don’t have to pay admission; the Met continues to project a $150 million revenue loss due to the pandemic.If the Met, the largest museum in the country, is struggling, that means smaller arts institutions are hurting even more, particularly those outside Manhattan, which tend to have less foot traffic and fewer big donors. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, is trying to recover from a pandemic period without when it lost millions in revenue, reduced staff and had to raid its endowment to pay the bills.The city’s music scene has faced its own challenges — from the diviest bars to nightclubs to the plush Metropolitan Opera.According to a study commissioned by the mayor’s office, some 2,400 concert and entertainment venues in New York City supported nearly 20,000 jobs in 2016. But the sector has had a hard time.Many are waiting to see if they will get help from a $16 billion federal grant fund intended to preserve music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses devastated by the pandemic. But the rollout of the program, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, has been slow and bumpy. Some owners, including Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York, were initially denied aid because the program mistakenly believed they were dead.Elsewhere, a music and arts space with a 1,600-person capacity in the heart of hipster Brooklyn, cut its staff from 120 people to 5 when the pandemic arrived. After the state lifted restrictions on smaller venues in June, it reopened and began hiring back some workers, but its owners fear it could take a year or two to return to profitability.The bar at Elsewhere on a July Saturday in New York.George Etheredge for The New York TimesMore party people packed in at Elsewhere.George Etheredge for The New York TimesThe club got help in the form of a $4.9 million shuttered venue grant from the federal government, which it said would be used to pay its debts — including for rent, utilities, and loans — and to fix up the space and pay staff. “Every dollar will be used just to dig ourselves out from Covid,” said one of the venue’s partners, Dhruv Chopra.And the Met Opera is still not sure if it can raise its gilded curtain in September, as planned, after the longest shutdown in its history. The company, which lost $150 million in earned revenues during the pandemic, recently struck deals to cut the pay of its choristers, soloists and stagehands. The company is now in tense negotiations with the musicians in its orchestra, who were furloughed without pay for nearly a year. If they fail to reach a deal, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, risks missing being part of the initial burst of reopening energy.Some cultural leaders are already looking past the fall, at the challenge of sustaining demand for tickets after the initial enthusiasm of reopening fades.“We have a lot of work to do to make sure that people know that we’re open,” said Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions, “to make people comfortable coming in, to keep the shows solid, and to get through the holidays and get through the winter.”Laura Zornosa contributed reporting. More

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    How Times Reporters Investigated Amazon Employment Practices

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    A recent Times project that examined how the tech giant manages its workers took months of reporting and hundreds of interviews.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Last summer, amid a hiring spree at Amazon so gigantic it left historians struggling for comparisons, Karen Weise, a Times reporter who covers the company from Seattle, brought up a puzzling question to her editors. Approaching the million-worker mark, Amazon was on track to becoming the largest private employer in the United States. Yet, in spite of solid wages and generous benefits, it was quickly cycling through employees. Why?Executives had an “almost palpable fear of running out of workers,” she said later.In August, she got a call from Jodi Kantor, a Times reporter in Brooklyn who was talking to workers from a variety of industries who were struggling with strict rules about time and attendance during the pandemic. She wanted to look more closely at “time off task,” or T.O.T., Amazon’s practice of monitoring workers by the second and disciplining them for too many unexcused pauses.One hot day in a New York City park, Ms. Kantor met with Dayana Santos, an employee who had been repeatedly praised by her bosses but fired for too much T.O.T. during one bad day filled with mishaps she said were beyond her control. Ms. Santos’s story raised fairness questions, and a business one: Why would Amazon, voracious for workers, fire a good employee?Those questions led to a recent Times investigative report on the company that revealed systemic problems in its model for managing workers, such as unbridled turnover, minimal human contact, an error-plagued leave system, delayed benefits and mistaken firings.Ms. Santos had worked at JFK8 on Staten Island, a compelling setting for a potential investigation: the only Amazon fulfillment center in the nation’s largest city, operating under maximum pandemic pressure to deliver to homebound customers. Other media outlets had examined working conditions, injury rates and numerous other aspects of Amazon warehouses. The Times reporters, focusing on JFK8, had a different goal: to understand the connection between the company’s employment model and its astonishing success. They set out to chronicle Amazon’s core relationship with its humongous, growing work force — who got hired and fired, and the rules, systems and assumptions that governed everything in between.But JFK8 was vast — about 5,000 employees in a space the size of 15 football fields — and managers and human resources workers were reluctant to talk. Ms. Weise contacted corporate employees, many of whom never responded. To help tackle the huge project, Grace Ashford, a researcher on the Investigations desk, joined the team. Together she and Ms. Kantor spent many hours on the phone and at the bus stop outside JFK8, including on Prime Day, asking workers about their experiences.Often, Ms. Kantor and Ms. Ashford found that new hires were grateful for the pay but left after a few weeks. “Amazon was a lifeline for them, until it wasn’t,” Ms. Ashford said.Knowing that their requests to interview Amazon’s most senior executives were long shots, the reporters had to find creative ways of understanding the culture inside JFK8. They spoke with human resources staff and corporate leaders, who described Amazon’s glitchy, strained systems and the business challenge of maintaining staff during a public health emergency.Ms. Weise took masked walks with Paul Stroup, a data scientist who had tried to steer Amazon through the crisis but left thinking Amazon could do better by its workers. Ms. Kantor spent the fall shadowing Ann Castillo, who was struggling with Amazon’s treatment of her severely ill husband, a JFK8 veteran.Back office employees at a different location, in Costa Rica, described the partial collapse of the company’s leave systems early in the pandemic, leading to problems like halted benefits for Mr. Castillo.Data obtained through public records showed that Amazon’s overall work force was largely Black and Latino, but internal documents revealed that Black workers at JFK8 were disproportionately fired.After Ms. Santos, the worker fired for T.O.T., applied for unemployment, Amazon contested her benefits. In an obscure New York administrative court, the company filed internal policy memos that provided a rare inside glimpse of the T.O.T. system.After almost 200 interviews, a picture emerged of a company that “seemed far more precise with packages than people,” Ms. Kantor said. Amazon had tried to grow its business quickly by creating a giant semi-automated machine for hiring and managing — but that system often stumbled.Ms. Weise was able to confirm that while the company boasted of job creation, turnover at the warehouses was roughly 150 percent a year — a figure never reported before — meaning Amazon had to replace the equivalent of its entire warehouse work force every eight months.That number, and the entire project, took on deeper meaning when David Niekerk, the architect of Amazon’s warehouse human resources system, told her the turnover was more or less by design. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, had sought to avoid an entrenched work force, fearing laziness and a “march to mediocrity.” So upward mobility and raises for warehouse workers were limited.As Ms. Kantor wrote and Ms. Ashford continued to report, Ms. Weise led a delicate, six-week effort to confirm the voluminous information in the story with Amazon and garner its responses. By then, the company had provided some input, including a tour of JFK8 by the general manager and an interview with Ofori Agboka, head of human resources for the warehouses, who defended Amazon but acknowledged that the company had leaned too heavily on technology and self-service.As part of the fact-checking process, the reporters repeatedly asked Amazon about the T.O.T. policy and Ms. Santos’s firing. Shortly before the article was published, Amazon announced an immediate policy change: No longer could someone be fired for one bad day. Ms. Santos and others were eligible for rehire.The article elicited a strong public reaction, tips from other employees who want to tell their stories and an outpouring of reader comments. (“It was not Bezos who made Amazon. It was all of us who bought from it,” one said.) On July 1, Amazon announced an addition to its leadership principles — critical guidelines for internal decisions and management — that focused on being a better employer.In coming months, the focus is likely to be on whether Amazon will change some of the practices that have propelled it to dominance, either because of internal action or outside force.“They say that broadly, their work force is happy, and their internal surveys say that more than 90 percent would recommend working at Amazon to a friend,” Ms. Weise said.“But 150 percent turnover in a year means that something isn’t working for many people.” More

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    How NYC Faces a Lasting Economic Toll Even as the Coronavirus Pandemic Passes

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    Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesNew York City is beginning to rebound from the economic devastation of the pandemic.But it won’t be easy. Neighborhoods remain pockmarked by vacant commercial real estate, and the city’s unemployment rate remains almost twice the national average.While there are signs that the city is coming back to life, the path forward is anything but clear.New York Faces Lasting Economic Toll Even as Pandemic PassesThe city’s prosperity is heavily dependent on patterns of work and travel that may be irreversibly altered.Nelson D. Schwartz, Patrick McGeehan and As the national economy recovers from the pandemic and begins to take off, New York City is lagging, with changing patterns of work and travel threatening the engines that have long powered its jobs and prosperity.New York has suffered deeper job losses as a share of its work force than any other big American city. And while the country has regained two-thirds of the positions it lost after the coronavirus arrived, New York has recouped fewer than half, leaving a deficit of more than 500,000 jobs.New York City lost greatest share of jobs among 20 largest U.S. citiesThe city had an 11.8 percent decline in jobs from February 2020 to April 2021, almost three times the loss on the national level.

    Source: Center for New York City Affairs at the New SchoolTaylor JohnstonRestaurants and bars are filling up again with New Yorkers eager for a return to normal, but scars are everywhere. Boarded-up storefronts and for-lease signs dot many neighborhoods. Empty sidewalks in Midtown Manhattan make it feel like a weekend in midweek. Subway ridership on weekdays is less than half the level of two years ago.The city’s economic plight stems largely from its heavy reliance on office workers, business travelers, tourists and the service businesses catering to all of them. All eyes are on September, when many companies aim to bring their workers back to the office and Broadway fully reopens, attracting more visitors and their dollars. But even then, the rebound will be only partial.The shift toward remote work endangers thousands of businesses that serve commuters who are likely to come into the office less frequently than before the pandemic, if at all. By the end of September, the Partnership for New York City, a business advocacy group, predicts that only 62 percent of office workers will return, mostly three days a week.Restoring the city to economic health will be an imposing challenge for its next mayor, who is likely to emerge from the Democratic primary on Tuesday. The candidates have offered differing visions of how to help struggling small businesses and create jobs.“We are bouncing back, but we are nowhere near where we were in 2019,” said Barbara Byrne Denham, senior economist at Oxford Economics. “We suffered more than everyone else, so it will take a little longer to recover.”At 10.9 percent in May, the city’s unemployment rate was nearly twice the national average of 5.8 percent. In the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, the rate is 15 percent. Workers in face-to-face sectors like restaurants and hospitality, many of whom are people of color, are still struggling.“While the recovery has probably exceeded expectations, unemployment remains staggeringly high for Black and brown individuals and historically marginalized communities,” said Jose Ortiz Jr., chief executive of the New York City Employment and Training Coalition, a work force development group.At the same time, hundreds of small businesses, which before the pandemic employed about half of the city’s work force, didn’t survive. And many that did are saddled with debt they took on to survive the downturn and owe tens of thousands of dollars in back rent.“I have a huge amount of debt to pay back because I had to borrow all over the place to stay alive,” said Robert Schwartz, the third-generation owner of Eneslow Shoes & Orthotics. He closed two of his four stores, but kept open branches on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and in Little Neck, Queens. “We’ll survive, but it’s going to be a long, slow recovery.”Office buildings in Lower Manhattan. The city depends more heavily than other places on office workers, business travelers, and the service businesses catering to all of them.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesEven if just 10 percent of Manhattan office workers begin working remotely most of the time, that translates into more than 100,000 people a day not picking up a coffee and bagel on their way to work or a drink afterward.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesEmpty sidewalks in parts of the city once filled with office workers make it feel like a weekend in midweek.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesOne crucial factor in the city’s economic trajectory, civic and business leaders say, is addressing safety concerns. Violent crime has risen since the pandemic hit — including a high-profile Times Square shooting in May that wounded two women and a 4-year-old girl — and the police have recently increased Midtown foot patrols.“The negatives of New York life are worse,” said Seth Pinsky, chief executive of the 92nd Street Y, a longtime cultural destination on the Upper East Side.“Crime is going up and the city is dirtier,” added Mr. Pinsky, who served as president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “It’s critical that we get the virtuous cycle going again.”On Friday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on a radio show on WNYC that the city had more police officers in the subway than at any time in the last 25 years. “We want to really encourage people back, to protect everyone,” he said.Nonetheless, worries about crime are frequently cited by workers who have returned. “There are questions from employees about safety in the city and increased concern,” said Jonathan Gray, president of the financial behemoth Blackstone. “My hope is that as the city fills up there will be less of that.”New York is certainly feeling less deserted than it did a few months ago. Nearly 195,000 pedestrians strolled through Times Square on June 13, more than twice the typical number in the bleak winter days when the coronavirus was raging. That’s a long way from the 365,000 who passed through daily before the pandemic, but the totals are edging higher, according to Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, a nonprofit group that promotes local businesses and the neighborhood.Change in foot traffic in New York City, by type of location

    Foot traffic data was aggregated and anonymized by Foursquare from smartphone apps that shared location data. Data as of June 18, 2021.Source: FoursquareTaylor JohnstonWhen Mr. Gray returned to Blackstone’s Midtown headquarters last summer, there were just 16 other people spread over 19 floors. Today, there are more than 1,600, and Blackstone is asking all employees who have been vaccinated to return.“It’s gone from feeling super lonely and now it’s feeling pretty normal,” Mr. Gray added.Wall Street and the banking sector are pillars of the city’s economy, and they have been among the most aggressive industries in prodding employees to go back to the office. James Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, told investors and analysts this month that “if you want to get paid in New York, you need to be in New York.”Many firms, including Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, have huge real estate holdings or loans to the industry, so there is more than civic pride in their push to get workers to return. Technology companies like Facebook and Google are increasingly important employers as well as major commercial tenants, and they have been increasing their office space. But they have been more flexible about letting employees continue to work remotely.Google, which has 11,000 employees in New York and plans to add 3,000 in the next few years, intends to return to its offices in West Chelsea in September, but workers will only be required to come in three days a week. The company has also said up to 20 percent of its staff can apply to work remotely full time.The decision by even a small slice of employees at Google and other companies to stay home part or all of the week could have a significant economic impact.Even if just 10 percent of Manhattan office workers begin working remotely most of the time, that translates into more than 100,000 people a day not picking up a coffee and bagel on their way to work or a drink afterward, said James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.“I expect a lot of people will return, but not all of them,” he said. “We might lose some neighborhood businesses as a result.”The absence of white-collar workers hurts people like Danuta Klosinski, 60, who had been cleaning office buildings in Manhattan for 20 years. She is one of more than about 3,000 office cleaners who remain out of work, according to Denis Johnston, a vice president of their union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.Ms. Klosinski, who lives in Brooklyn, said that she had been furloughed twice since last spring and that she had been idle since November. She said she feared that if she were not recalled by September, she would lose the health insurance that covers her husband, who suffered a stroke and a heart attack.“I’m worried about losing everything,” she said.Also weighing on the city’s outlook is the decline in visits by tourists, who are venturing back in dribbles, not in droves.Performers in Times Square, which saw nearly 195,000 pedestrians pass through on a recent day. That’s a long way from the 365,000 who passed through daily before the pandemic.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesAn ice cream vendor waited for customers at Bryant Park in Midtown.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesPassengers aboard a cruise to the Statue of Liberty. City officials expect that it will take at least a few years to draw as many visitors as in 2019.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York TimesIn 2019, New York welcomed over 66 million out-of-towners, and they spent more than $45 billion in hotels, restaurants, shops and theaters. City officials expect that it will take years to draw so many visitors again, especially the bigger-spending foreign tourists and business travelers on expense accounts.Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, said domestic tourism was rebounding faster than she had expected. “The local population is out and about and happy to be so,” Ms. Futter said. But the scarcity of international visitors “is going to tamp down the pace of recovery,” she said.That lag will spell prolonged pain for many businesses. Employment in hotels and restaurants is about 150,000 lower than it was before the pandemic, while the number of jobs in the performing arts is down about 40,000.To be sure, there are signs of a strengthening economy. After many residents fled the city last year, high-priced condos are again being snapped up, and the rental market is showing signs of firming after price drops.Rudin Management, the real estate giant, is trimming back the concessions it offered to attract tenants at the height of the pandemic. “I’m getting calls from people saying their son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter is graduating and asking for an apartment,” said William C. Rudin, the firm’s chief executive. “We didn’t get those calls for a year.”New Yorkers are also getting out more. When the Rockaway Hotel in Queens opened in September after years of planning, a hip destination in a historically working-class beach neighborhood, “people who lived four blocks away would take hotel rooms for the night because they wanted a staycation,” said Terence Tubridy, a managing partner.Since indoor dining resumed in February, the 53-room hotel’s weekend occupancy rate has been 80 percent, Mr. Tubridy said. Along with more visitors recently from California and the Midwest, he reports a flood of inquiries about weddings and birthday parties.As the hotel prepares for its first opportunity to serve the bustling summer crowds at Rockaway Beach, Mr. Tubridy is looking to add 100 employees to his current staff of 180.Amy Scherber is also seeing signs of better days. When the pandemic struck, she was forced to close all but two of her Amy’s Bread shops in New York City and lay off more than 100 employees. She wound up making cakes and pastries herself in a kitchen in Long Island City, Queens.But now, Ms. Scherber has rehired some of her employees, and a crew of four bakers is handling the pastries while she oversees the steadily increasing production of baguettes and other loaves. She has reopened her store in Chelsea Market, a Manhattan tourist destination, and is preparing to reopen other retail locations. Her wholesale business is also rebounding as restaurants that were closed for months are again ordering dinner rolls.“In the last couple of weeks, we finally have seen the business starting to pick up a bit,” said Ms. Scherber, who started her operation 29 years ago. She is hopeful about a strong recovery, she said. But she added, “I see the city taking several years to be the economy it was.”The Empire State Building and One World Trade Center.Gabriela Bhaskar/The New York Times More

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    How It Looks to Live in N.Y.C. During a Pandemic on $100 a Week

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    Ms. Galán’s home is small, but happy. Christopher, 11, Mia, 7, and Ian, 1, get along. The older children help keep the space tidy. The youngest has kept them giggling during the long year they’ve spent together indoors. Before the pandemic, Ms. Galán worked at a dry cleaner in the Bronx, earning about $350 per […] More

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    Mark Levitan, Who Measured the True Face of Poverty, Dies at 73

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    He came up with a more realistic threshold, changing the way New York City determines who is impoverished and persuading the Obama White House to follow suit.Mark Levitan, who was instrumental in providing New York City officials with a more realistic measure of poverty, and in persuading the federal government to follow suit, died on Thursday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 73.His son, Dan, said the cause was complications of leukemia. Dr. Levitan lived in Brooklyn.The results of Dr. Levitan’s alternative method of measurement were nothing to boast about: In 2006, the first year that the new formula was applied, the overall poverty rate in the city leapt by more than four percentage points compared with the official benchmark, and among older people it soared to a stunning 32 percent from 18.1 percent.But by calculating the added benefits of tax credits, food stamps and housing subsidies to poor people while also taking into account the local costs of rent, transportation, health care and child care, economists, using Dr. Levitan’s methodology, could also calibrate which anti-poverty programs were doing the most good for which group.In 2011, for example, Dr. Levitan found that food stamps and other benefits helped keep a quarter of a million New Yorkers above the poverty threshold.He lobbied in Washington for a similar national redefinition of poverty. While the anachronistic official standard was retained, beginning in 2011 the Census Bureau began issuing what it called a broader Supplemental Poverty Measure. Like New York City’s, the supplemental measure took into account additional factors that affected overall income, as recommended by the National Academy of Sciences.Dr. Levitan was an improbable recruit by the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Working for an unapologetic capitalist, he took a job in which he managed to practice some of what he had been preaching for most of his career as a socialist organizer and outside critic.In his decade as a senior policy analyst for the Community Service Society, Mr. Levitan had been an outspoken champion of marginalized New Yorkers. After the 2001 recession, for instance, he pointed out that nearly half of the city’s Black men were unemployed.Dr. Levitan joined the Bloomberg administration in 2007 as the director of poverty research for the city’s new Center for Economic Opportunity, which the mayor had established the year before to measure more precisely who needed help and why, and to design pilot programs to target those groups.Linda Gibbs, who was Mr. Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for health and human services, said by email that Mr. Levitan had “created a lasting change in the conversation here in New York City, and across the country, as the work he spearheaded to change the way poverty is measured was adopted by the Obama administration.”In keeping with a life committed to making a difference in the well-being of New Yorkers, she added, “Mark framed a clearer picture of who suffers from real deprivation.”Mark Kenneth Levitan was born on May 12, 1948, in Manhattan to Arthur and Miriam (Orleans) Levitan. His father was a jeweler, his mother a homemaker. He grew up in Brooklyn and Teaneck, N.J.After graduating with a degree in philosophy from Boston University in 1970, he became a factory worker, making Nerf balls near Boston and working in the Dodge automobile paint shop outside Detroit. He was also an organizer for the International Socialists and, after the Dodge plant closed, a researcher for the United Auto Workers.In 1982 he married Gabrielle Semel, who later became a lawyer for the Communications Workers of America. She survives him, along with their son, who is an executive vice president of BerlinRosen, a public relations firm; two grandchildren; and a brother, Donald.After the couple moved from the Detroit area to New York, Dr. Levitan earned a doctorate in economics from the New School and joined the Community Service Society in 1997.After he retired in 2014, he taught at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York. More