NYC Favela Eateries
Virus Deaths Approach Spring Record Amid Changing U.S. Crisis
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/us/covid-deaths-united-states.html
A favela look has appeared on NYC avenues and streets with hastily erected sidewalk eateries, diverse, rickety, slap-dash, with home-brewed decoration of plants, menus, wear a mask signs, heaters, electrical cords under ramps, cheerful lights, reflectors to warn traffic, plastic barriers at seatings, waiters and maitre de's serving the clientele, passersby and strollers and panhandlers and cyclists filling the gap between storefront and gazebos.
It's an unsanitary and ugly mess, frankly speaking, not at all romantic or socially integrating or compliant with safety and health regulations, despite producing a bit of economic enhancement, again like the favelas where inhabitants have to make do the best they can without help from the few who have resources to avoid squalor and disease and sickness and inadequate income to live without threat of what tomorrow may bring home from the idiots without masks knocking back gin and whiskey and beer and chemicals and weeds.
From the news its clear the homeless being stashed in fancy hotels are doing better than the excessively-homed forced to seek relief from incarceration in the fast developing slums on the gangland-streets of infectious New York.
If Leonard Bernstein was still tootling he might scribe a Broadway winner about this frightened city, this sad song, this crazed dance of nervous expectation that best to enjoy it while we can, when right there floating above the sidewalks are air-borne predators eager to take away our breaths.