People flock to NYC-area bars, beaches as ‘quarantine fatigue’ intensifies

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People flock to NYC-area bars, beaches as ‘quarantine fatigue’ intensifies
NY Post, May 16, 2020

They’re partying like it’s 2019.

Lockdown-weary New Yorkers ditched the distancing to get social instead this weekend — transforming parts of the Big Apple into a raucous, late-season Mardi Gras.  Yet the city’s COVID-be-damned attitude was nothing compared with the scene in Belmar, NJ, a beach popular with Staten Islanders and Brooklynites.

Huge crowds waited shoulder-to-shoulder on the boardwalk for their turn to buy beach badges.  “The line for beach badges was like four non-socially distanced blocks long,” tweeted Jarrett Seidler, who described the boardwalk as “obscenely packed.”

Outside popular bars on the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side, the East and West Villages and in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, The Post found booze hounds arriving for the takeout cocktails and then staying — and staying — to sip drinks on packed sidewalks and soak up the lively scenes.

“How are you going to drink with a mask on?” one reveler, hairdresser Akeem ­Kelley, told The Post.  His mask dangled below his chin as he stood outside the Upper East Side’s popular Dorrian’s Red Hand bar — where crowds exceeding three dozen people, nearly all unmasked, were found in the early evenings of Friday and Saturday.

“They don’t care about us,” said Ann Trent, 72, of Manhattan, on Saturday.  She sat on a bench at the west end of the Brooklyn Bridge as a steady stream of mask-free sightseers and bicyclists passed her by, and she mused, “What happened to all of us protecting everyone else?”

The crowds, which enjoyed summer-like weather that climbed to a high of 76 degrees on Saturday, apparently had forgotten that they live in the epicenter of the pandemic.

Outside the East Village Social on St. Marks Place, two guitarists helped kick off the weekend’s festivities Friday night by plugging into a portable amplifier and jamming for tips from the gathered crowd.  “Obviously too many people,” one bartender conceded to The Post on Saturday.


More: https://nypost.com/2020/05/16/people-flock-to-nyc-area-bars-beaches-as-quarantine-fatigue-intensifies/