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End the Lockdowns… But Don’t Be Fooled, It Won’t Save Us
Twelve days after it reopened for indoor dining (the only possible kind of dining, given its location inside of Grand Central Station), the famed Grand Central Oyster Bar has closed of its own accord. The New York Post has the story,
“We were only doing 3 percent of the revenues we ordinarily do at this time,” the chef added. Early on the Oyster Bar decided against providing takeout because commuters were not coming into Grand Central and nearby office towers were similarly devoid of people.
The owners of the Oyster Bar declare they aren’t considering closing permanently, but of course they are. Every restaurant in America, but especially those in lockdown zones, are considering closing or already have. In Disney Springs, even Wolfgang Puck decided this week to close permanently.
No restaurant in a high-traffic place like a train station or near a tourist destination will survive, no matter what local politicians do. Many of us have (rightly) been focused on pressuring politicians to loosen the grip on restaurants if we have a hope of ever eating out ever again, but the closure of these restaurants makes something very clear: Even if or when restaurants are legally going to be allowed to open, it’s not likely they’ll survive for one reason: fear. People are too scared, no matter what politicians say, to leave their homes. It goes to show we don’t need lockdowns or regulations; people are staying home voluntarily and have been for a long time. But the road back isn’t going to be easy or quick; we are in for a world of pain for a very, very long time. We’re basically committing societal suicide; fear of a virus that has next to no chance of killing any of us but will destroy life as we know it for a long time to come. If some of the most famous restaurants in New York City are operating at 3%, when (if ever) will anyone try to throw a concert or a live sports event again? I’ve been focused on ending the lockdowns because it feels like that’s the endpoint for this madness, but we need to start focusing on what this deep and paralyzing fear will do to our long-term recovery efforts.
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I hear you and agree, but…….it depends on where you live. I’m in Florida and for the first time since restaurants opened back up, we went into a restaurant and were told the wait time was 30 minutes (on a MONDAY night.)
Now I truly am glad that restaurants are doing better. But we had kind of gotten used to being able to just walk into any restaurant without a reservation and be seated immediately.
I’m glad some parts of the country are sane and will survive. Don’t have any hopes for where we live, unfortunately.
In Seattle and excited I will be able to go the movies this weekend, even if it is Liam Leesom’s umpteen remake of Taken.
Well, at the risk of sounding obvious, NYC is not the country. I don’t live in Phoenix any more, but even when I did, during “the height of the pandemic” even places that were only doing pick-up business were busy. I mean regular places that is, where regular people go. Maybe not the fancy steakhouses, I never went there even before.
Maybe The Oyster Bar, right in the middle of Grand Central Station, right in the middle of New York City, can’t stay open. But I’m not so pessimistic about the rest of the country.
You know what would be a truly fascinating outcome is if red America and the strongholds of Trump supporters end up with thriving economies as blue areas die from their own neuroses?
The bonus of state sovereignty that Trump (and his Senate!) Abided by was to let them have the consequences. It sucks for the truly innocent in those areas, but here’s clear evidence that the policies of those areas abjectly failed them. It should be a lesson to all of them.
A segment of the Christian community pinpointed early on that this is a spiritual battle. Fear destroys. And we have a populace devoid of faith who are very susceptible to fear.
My guess is that there has been a density paradigm shift. The shift was going to happen anyway, but COVID 19 greatly accelerated it. This does not bode well for Manhattan Island, much of NYC in general, trains, planes, shopping malls (ok, their days were already numbered…) and many if not most restaurants. The Internet, computers and cell phones were going to do this anyway on their own, but a decade or more from now. Rule of thumb: if you live in a building with an elevator, you and your neighborhood have to have a talk. Hard to see how any “restaurant” that didn’t make most of its money on takeout/delivery will survive. The Oyster Bar, formerly an elegant space straight out of a film from the 1940’s, is now, seemingly, an elegant, underground cave with no windows. This is very sad.
Don’t worry, even when things re-open here in California, we get scolded: https://www.sfgate.com/local/editorspicks/article/Outdoor-dining-marina-san-francisco-covid-15632141.php
Here in Bozeman, MT where we have had a relatively easy time of it until recently, we’re booming. Housing prices have gone up 20% since March and the bars and restaurants are basically as busy as ever. The main thing that hasn’t restarted are larger gatherings like concerts.
I think Dems have been traumatized by the media, but Republicans fortunately have not.
I try to do my part, including by going to Pizza Hut which seems to have had walk-in ordering and carryout all along and now has reopened dine-in too, instead of Domino’s right next to it which now only does phone-ordering and “curbside pickup” and never did have dine-in.
Oyster Bar, on the lower level of Grand Central, was not in a good location during the city’s descent into darkness from the late 1960s to the Giuliani revival, because the number of trains using the station had dwindled as the city lost businesses, and before Grand Central was refurbished by the MTA (and closed during the overnight hours) it had the same homeless problem that Bill de Blasio had brought back even prior to the COVID outbreak, which led to a protest by one of the restaurant operators back in March, who also happened to be the dad of Lady Gaga.
So the problems of 2020 are really similar to those of 1980 for the specific location, but the COVID shutdowns by de Blasio and Cuomo have taken a decaying situation and both made it worse and spread it far and wide across the metro NYC area (with Gov. Murphy also doing his part to screw things up in New Jersey). And the answer to the problem is the same as it was 27 years ago — if the residents of the city, and its bar and restaurant owners, want conditions to improve, start electing better politicians, who won’t go on power trips and close down parts of the economy because they’ve never spent a day in their life in the private sector.
Restaurants here in the Seattle area are open, but lower capacity and ridiculous rules like whenever you leave your table to go to the restroom you have to wear a mask. I went for training at my election job today, and I will have to wear a mask at all times while in the building. Here’s a little post I did over at RushBabe49.com, for a Photo Challenge post! The theme this week was Communication, and I simply had to do this. Our 17th wedding anniversary was Sunday, and we went to one of our favorite places for dinner.
Eh. Probably for the better. Oyster farming is ecologically unsustainable. The popularity of the food harkens back to the day of Jay Gould and the other robber barons who made their fortunes at the expense of the poor, when women couldn’t vote, and segregation ensured that African Americans could not thrive, let alone be served at the Oyster Bar. I don’t know why you valorize a restaurant built on stolen land in a structure whose ornamentation and design shrieks of Western supremacism.
The Oyster Bar should be replaced by the People’s Bean Curd Dispensary #23, which distributes nutritious tofu to all for no cost.
Seriously, it’s 2020, and you’re stanning oysters.
I love tofu stuffed with oysters or shrimp. Great dim sum.
Maybe Oyster Bar failing says more about NYC and its overall environment and leadership than it does about fear and this one bout of illness. People seem to have pretty short memories: we forget (or push to the back of our minds) all kinds of horrific things and then go about our business, even when it would be letter to remember longer and get ready for the next – and very likely -emergency. But cities can be ground to the ground and truly put out of business. Some of the people who left manhattan will return – but so many others will find life is just fine wherever they went to and stay put. And the jobs they had there are either no longer there there or just gone overall due to the decisions of NY management. That’s on the citizens and the politicians they elected.
And NH? Restaurants are now 100% and chattering, even with masks more or less on. But the most notable trend is that builders and suppliers (especially pool companies) are jammed: those nyc people who came to summer places because they were so fearful have stuck in and are renovating to stay. And Sig Sauer is opening a manufacturing plant in Rochester. So -all is not fear.
We have everything to fear…of fear itself.
Here in Eastern TN, we went to a Mexican restaurant last Friday night. There was not an empty seat in the entire place. No capacity limitations whatsoever. It felt great.
The “experts” claim that people won’t go out to places such as restaurants and bars because they are afraid. Maybe it’s because the “experts” keep telling them that it is not safe and is scary. People can decide for themselves. Isn’t that what a “free people” are supposed to do?
A couple of weeks ago, a local restaurant that has been a longtime favorite of mine — my go-to choice for dinner on my birthday — announced that they were closing permanently. It’s a place that my wife and I have been visiting regularly since the early 1990s, and it was always popular; we knew we needed to get there early if we wanted to avoid an hour-long wait.
They had been closed since the lockdown began, but even after the governor allowed restaurants to reopen, they remained closed (temporarily, they thought). In their message about the permanent closure, they talked about how they had tried and tried to come up with some viable way they could reopen and feel safe, but they finally decided it was impossible.
So they decided to go out of business without even trying to reopen to see if it was possible. Evidently they judged that even if they followed all of the recommended guidelines for social distancing and cleaning, it would not be safe — or, more precisely, they would not feel safe. The government didn’t tell them they couldn’t reopen; the customers didn’t tell them they couldn’t reopen (I feel sure sufficient business would have been there); no, they decided that the risks of reopening were, for them, worse than the certainty of closing forever and letting all of their staff go.
Bethany,
I do not wish to be harsh but we need to place some blame here. The left claims to “believe” in science. First, science is not a dogma that requires you to believe in it. You make a hypothesis and then you verify empirically with facts and experiments. The left, lately, says that the facts don’t matter only the narrative matters. This is an extremely unscientific point of view no matter what they want you to “believe”.
Finally, their left-wing dogma drives them to believe that the United States of America is some kind of great danger to humanity. Given all of this, we must recognize that insisting on blind adherence to a lockdown that has done massive damage to this country is a plus for the left. They are happy if not gleeful about it. This is why there is no substitute for Trump winning this election. It is a matter of survival.
Regards,
Jim
I think you answered your own question. If you’re allowed to choose there’s too great of a chance that you will choose unwisely. Therefore the choice will be made for you. And isn’t that what government is here for? To serve you and to do things for you. Like think for you. And choose for you. All those nasty decisions will just get in your way.
I said just this morning in another forum that “Smoking and COVID will always let you know which people are quite happy to use the power of government to force people on the other side of the issue to do what they want.”
Our governor recently “allowed” restaurants in South Carolina to operate at 100% capacity and ease some restrictions. The Charleston Compost and Courier recently had an editorial saying this was a bad idea:
https://www.postandcourier.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-mcmaster-move-makes-it-tougher-for-sc-restaurants-to-be-responsible/article_22088614-04cc-11eb-9149-67b9f92f9fd5.html
You have to do a quick screen capture of the editorial before the “Sign up with us” pop-up appears.
Lots of business deaths in the DC metropolitan area. Many small operations that depended on commuters and office workers are gone. (Federal employees are on remote work status with no layoffs).
My brother- and sister-in-law are restaurant owners who have survived mostly on the basis of fiercely loyal patrons who bought lots of delivered food and who returned en masse when 6-foot spaced outdoor dining was permitted by our Wise and All-Powerful Authorities (Peace be Upon Them). They had even included a free roll of toilet paper with deliveries in March and April (the restaurant had over-ordered TP in bulk back in January) as a marketing gag.
The destruction of the Trump economy, the habit of dependence on federal aid, and the beatdown of pesky entrepreneurs who tend to be active conservatives is all win-win for Democrats.
At least until Nov 3. Hopefully.
Stad,
I think everyone at the Compost should be on half salary for the duration of the lockdown. I wonder if the editorializing would change in tone. Just a hunch.
Regards,
Jim
We’ve been subjected to screeds against “toxic” masculinity for years now.
It seems to me that the widespread fear and paranoia about the virus is evidence that toxic femininity is much more widespread and dangerous in our culture, not only among women but increasingly among men, especially in the “intellectual” professions.
Thank you. Ask 2 engineers to come up with a solution to a problem, and both, using the same education and experience could very well come up with 2 different solutions. And what is often not understood, is that in evaluating the problem, both have to make assumptions. Assumptions are good guesses.
He’s completely off the deep end on many things, especially now, but this was several years ago…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r11Vl0zrrcM
Please don’t take this the wrong way, but restaurants are notoriously volatile businesses. They come and go quickly. Yes, some owners will get wiped out, but best run and yummiest will survive. New ones will spring up. Restaurant workers are generally very flexible and will get work at new places quickly. I don’t think there will be any structural changes in the sit-down restaurant industry. People just like eating out. Counter service, take-out, and drive-through will be a bit different, but the workers will still be required. The logistics are just better and that won’t go back.