New York
The Artifacts of New York’s Pandemic Era
The vintage aura of Sevilla Restaurant — the servers in bow ties, the leather booths, the glow of lanterns — reflects a bygone era of the West Village in Manhattan, where the establishment was founded almost a century ago.
But alongside those period details, there is one dissonant design element that evokes a far more recent moment in time: clear plastic screens dividing the restaurant’s rear tables.
“The partitions came up during the pandemic,” said Miguel Lloves, 47, whose family took over the business in the 1960s. “I did ask my dad if we’d want to take them down. He didn’t let me. Somehow, in his mind, he thinks it’s going to come back.”
Scan your eyes around New York City, and you’ll spot them everywhere, these artifacts of the pandemic, lingering through intent or indifference.
These remnants of that anxious time now serve as some of the only public reminders of those deadly years.
Weathered signs mandating mask use, QR codes posted around restaurant tabletops, faded social distancing stickers plastered on the ground — taken together, they form an urban fossil record of a place that has otherwise largely moved on.
“Forget removing the gum on the sidewalk,” said Patrick Willingham, the executive director of the Public Theater in Manhattan. “The stickers are permanent. They’ll never get them off the ground.”
Take a walk through the Queens neighborhoods surrounding Elmhurst Hospital — the epicenter of the city’s pandemic response — where a “Stop the Spread” sign still hangs prominently near the entrance of the emergency room.
At Hector Escobar Hair Studio, a salon nearby on 37th Avenue, a “Certificate of Disinfection” is centrally displayed on the door. To the south, at Fay Da, a Chinese bakery on Broadway, an “Affirmation of Compliance With Workplace Vaccination Requirements” is posted on the storefront glass. And at Khao Kang, a Thai restaurant on Woodside Avenue, plump bottles of Purell rest on each of the six dining tables inside.
“I think it’s a good reminder for people,” said Joe Secanky, a nurse from Milwaukee, who pumped sanitizer onto his hands one recent afternoon before sharing a fiery spread of food with his wife, Edna.
Like the bottles of sanitizer, certain remnants of the pandemic have maintained some utility in the present day.
Mighty Oak Roasters, in Astoria, Queens, is one of many businesses around the city that has continued to operate a sidewalk window for takeout orders.
“It’s great for people with dogs or strollers and people who ride their bikes,” said Peter Moses, a co-founder of the coffee shop, which keeps a small sign out front telling customers that masks are still appreciated. (At least one staffer, Mr. Moses said, is immunocompromised.)
New Yorkers can also unearth traces of the pandemic in their homes. Alongside the typical detritus — stacks of Covid tests, boxes of gloves, Pelotons — are often things imbued with more meaning.
Mr. Moses, for example, has kept a half-used bottle of hand sanitizer from his friends’ wedding in 2021 on a living room shelf. Its label has a timely message: “Share love, not germs.” He thought it was an object worth remembering.
Likewise, some New Yorkers have tried to turn the vestiges of Covid into something beautiful.
Those ordering from the bar these days at Night of Joy, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, face a decorative latticework spanning the length of the counter. During the height of the pandemic, the structure had a huge plastic sheet stretched across it.
“I agonized for weeks back then about how to make the most beautiful sneeze guard I could,” said Jen Armstrong, the owner of the bar.
With the help of a local artist, Alexander Barton, she realized her vision, purchasing gardening trellises made of willow from Home Depot and painting them gold.
As the worst of the pandemic wound down, Ms. Armstrong removed the plastic sheets, but kept the barriers. She realized they had become a part of her bar’s aesthetic and a conversation starter. She had received compliments from customers.
And though the trellises have worn down over the years — “Drunk people like to touch fragile things,” she said — she would now rather renovate or replace them than remove them altogether.
“It became a happy accident,” she said. “I’m proud of myself for taking such a horrible object and making it into something that, you know, means something else.”
The most visible traces of the pandemic across the city, though, may be the masks that still dangle from some peoples’ faces.
The days of mandates and widespread usage are, of course, long over. A sign that remains posted near the entrance of the subway at 40th Street and Broadway in Manhattan — “Face coverings are required” — goes entirely ignored by the throngs of riders who pass by each day.
And yet it has remained relatively common to see a few people wearing masks in a crowded train car or indoor space — a practice that was basically nonexistent in the city before the pandemic, aside from the occasional tourist.
A number of the city’s performance spaces — including the Public Theater, where Mr. Willingham is the executive director — have even continued to offer occasional shows where masks are required. And when they are not, Mr. Willingham said, there are still always some mask users in the audience.
“It’s become part of the landscape,” he said.
They’ve become a subtle part of the landscape, too, at Sevilla Restaurant.
Since the end of the pandemic, the restaurant’s in-house guitar player, a musician in his 70s, has continued wearing his mask while singing songs around the dining room.
He does it for his safety, Mr. Lloves said, but it has caused occasional displeasure among certain outspoken guests.
“He’s a constant reminder, and some people don’t like that,” Mr. Lloves said. “I think it disturbs them. They almost don’t want to be reminded. They’d rather not think about it.”
She testified last year that she first met the former producer when she was about 27, after moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting. He pressured her into giving him a massage shortly after, she said.
In 2013, she was visiting New York and had planned a morning meal with friends and the producer. He arrived early and got a hotel room over her objections, Ms. Mann testified. Still, she went with him to the room, where he injected his penis with medication that produced an erection and then raped her, she said.
She tried to fight, she said, but eventually “I just gave up, I wanted to get out.”
In the years that followed, Ms. Mann said, she fell into a complex relationship with Mr. Weinstein, which included friendly email exchanges, phone calls and several consensual sexual encounters. In her testimony last year, she called it a “dance” in which she tried to keep him both happy and at a distance. At one point, Ms. Mann said, she decided to enter a romantic relationship with him.
During cross-examination, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein questioned Ms. Mann about money — close to $500,000 — that she had received as settlement payments through a fund established as part of the bankruptcy of Mr. Weinstein’s company.
“This is not about money for me,” Ms. Mann testified.
For this trial, Mr. Weinstein has hired a new trial team of Jacob Kaplan, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos.
The lawyers have already signaled that their defense will differ, at least slightly. They have indicated that they will not argue that Ms. Mann made the accusations against their client for financial gain.
The grandson of an infamous mob boss was sentenced to prison on Monday after pleading guilty to defrauding the federal government out of more than $1 million in Covid relief funds, some of which he invested in cryptocurrency.
Carmine G. Agnello Jr., the grandson of John J. Gotti, the former leader of the Gambino crime family, was sentenced to 15 months in prison by Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury in Federal District Court in Central Islip, N.Y. She also ordered Mr. Agnello to pay $1.3 million in restitution to the Small Business Administration.
Mr. Agnello, 39, fidgeted in court on Monday. Some of his family members were in attendance, including mob figures previously convicted of federal crimes: his father Carmine (the Bull) Agnello and his uncle John A. Gotti.
Wearing a gray, checkered suit, Mr. Agnello read a brief statement in court calling his crime “wrong, selfish and criminal.” He added that he never wanted to “find myself in prison” like so many of his relatives.
“I regret not only what I did, but the disappointment I caused my family,” he said.
Starting in April 2020, Mr. Agnello applied for at least three loans for his Queens-based company, Crown Auto Parts & Recycling L.L.C., through a program meant to support small businesses hurt by the pandemic.
He applied for the loans under false pretenses, claiming he did not have a criminal record when he in fact did have one, prosecutors said. He then used more than $400,000 of the borrowed money to invest in a crypto business.
Mr. Agnello pleaded guilty in September 2024 to a single count of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors with the Eastern District of New York had sought a sentence of around three years, as well as $1.3 million in restitution.
He “shamefully lined his own pockets with government and taxpayers’ dollars,” Joseph Nocella Jr., the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.
As a child, Mr. Agnello starred on the reality television show “Growing Up Gotti” alongside his mother, Victoria Gotti, and two brothers, Frank and John. The show, which ran on A&E for three seasons and was canceled in 2005, depicted a Long Island household in the milieu of “The Sopranos.”
At the time, Mr. Agnello’s father was in prison and had been divorced from Ms. Gotti, a former columnist for The New York Post, leaving her to raise three rowdy sons. The intense media focus on the Gottis gave the grandson “a distorted sense of reality,” wrote John A. Gotti, Mr. Agnello’s uncle and the leader of the crime family in the 1990s, in a letter to Judge Choudhury before the sentencing.
“Being part of the Gotti family meant growing up with too much attention, expectations and society’s judgment that most kids never have to deal with,” Mr. Gotti wrote. He added that his nephew faced pressure “to live up to the Gotti name.”
Mr. Agnello found his way into the family business, in a way. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to running an unregistered scrap business. That case echoed his father’s racketeering conviction after he firebombed a rival scrap company in Queens that was run by undercover police officers.
Mr. Agnello’s grandfather exercised power with unrelenting brutality and delighted in the spotlight. He seized control of the family by organizing the 1985 assassination of his predecessor, Paul Castellano, before running enterprises that investigators estimated earned about $500 million a year from ventures that included extorting unions, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and stock fraud.
After numerous acquittals in state and federal trials, aided by juries that had been tampered with, Mr. Gotti earned the nickname “Teflon Don” from New York City’s tabloids. He was ultimately convicted in 1992 on 13 criminal counts and died of cancer in 2002 at age 61 in a federal prison hospital.
Jeffrey Lichtman, a lawyer for Mr. Agnello, told Judge Choudhury that Mr. Agnello had grown up with no male role models in his life, as 15 of his family members had gone to prison, including his grandfather when he was 5 and his father when he was 14.
Mr. Lichtman, who also represented Mr. Agnello’s uncle, called his client’s crime “horrific behavior” but added that his conduct was inevitable.
Charles P. Kelly, a federal prosecutor, said in court on Monday that Mr. Agnello’s family history was no excuse for his fraud.
“This case is not about John Gotti; it’s about Carmine Agnello,” Mr. Kelly said.
This year, Steven Metcalf, another lawyer for Mr. Agnello, asked Judge Choudhury for a sentence with no prison time so that Mr. Agnello could donate a kidney to his mother, who has renal disease and also appeared in court on Monday. Without the transplant, Ms. Gotti could die during her son’s prison term, Mr. Metcalf said.
But in April, Mr. Agnello hired Mr. Lichtman, who apologized to the judge for Mr. Metcalf’s “voluminous argument” in support of Mr. Agnello, which stretched hundreds of pages.
As Judge Choudhury announced the sentence, Mr. Agnello kept his gaze forward and nodded. Judge Choudhury pushed back on the notion that his upbringing drove him to commit wire fraud.
“You were raised with access to opportunities. These are opportunities that many people in our society do not have,” she said.
After the sentence on Monday, Mr. Agnello embraced his family members in a hallway of the courthouse, one by one, kissing his uncle and his father on the cheek. He must surrender to the authorities to begin serving his prison term by July 20.
Outside the courthouse, his uncle John A. Gotti addressed a group of reporters.
“We had 15 members of our family who went to prison,” he said. “I think that’s enough. I think we did our time.”
It was one of the worst commutes in years. A power outage stranded more than 3,500 New York City subway riders in stuffy, crowded train cars for more than two hours on Dec. 11, 2024, during the evening rush.
Firefighters evacuated riders from the disabled trains, but not before some passengers were forced to relieve themselves between cars, according to people who were present. The ensuing delays, which affected the A, C, F and G lines in Brooklyn, stretched well into the morning, snarling the commute for thousands more riders.
But the foul-up didn’t start on the tracks — it began about 40 feet beneath the sidewalk, in a concrete bunker called a substation, like this one.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the New York City subway, operates 225 of these substations. They provide the electricity that keeps trains moving.
Some are deep underground, while others are in fortresslike buildings close to train tracks. Dozens of the facilities are nearing 100 years old, and some components have gone decades without substantial upgrades.
The electrical outage in 2024 started after a critical failure in a Downtown Brooklyn substation that dates to the 1930s. Heavy rainfall most likely seeped into equipment and caused an explosion so forceful that it knocked a door off its hinges, according to the M.T.A.
Without adequate electricity, trains that were closest to the damaged substation could not move, and their ventilation systems shut down.
Such major failures are rare, but are responsible for some of the subway’s worst logjams, said Jamie Torres-Springer, the head of the authority’s construction and development division.
“That’s what causes the most difficult, painful disruptions in the system that drive people out of their minds,” he said.
In hopes of preventing the next nightmare commute, the M.T.A. is making the biggest investment in power in its history. Transit officials plan to spend $4 billion on new power systems by 2029, including upgrades to 75 subway substations. That’s three times as many as were renovated during the last major round of repairs, which ended in 2024.
They have their work cut out for them.
Hidden beneath a steel-trap door on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 36 steps below the surface, is one of the system’s oldest remaining substations.
“This is a blast from the past,” said David Jacobs, the M.T.A.’s acting general superintendent for power stations, who donned a hard hat and safety glasses on a recent weekday before disappearing into the underground space.
The substation, near 73rd Street and Central Park West, was built in the 1930s, and is expected to be renovated during the current blitz.
A dirty tarp hung in one corner of the cavernous room, to catch water that seeped through worn concrete. Rows of machines hummed with the constant surge of power feeding the electrified third rail on nearby tracks.
It takes about 2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to run the subway system annually. That’s enough power to light 128,000 homes for a year.
The substations’ main function is to convert raw, high-voltage electricity from the electrical grid into lower-voltage power that can be delivered to the third rail.
But the aging equipment has become progressively less efficient and reliable, and harder to maintain.
The substations are spaced out across the city, to help keep electricity flowing to trains even if one of them malfunctions. But the equipment has sometimes failed when asked to carry an extra load, leading to cascading problems.
Last year, there were 758 “major incidents” on the subway, ones in which 50 or more trains were delayed. Substations cause a small but disruptive share of the problems, according to M.T.A. data.
“Power is everything,” said John Ross, a recently retired transit worker who was dispatched to help after several service disruptions in the subway, including the outage in 2024. “When it breaks, it breaks good.”
M.T.A. officials assessed the condition of every substation in recent years, and found that 36 percent of the equipment was in poor condition or in need of replacement.
While the main purpose of the upgrades is to reduce train delays, the changes have other benefits. The M.T.A. is installing a new signal system that relies on wireless technology to automatically control train movement.
The system, known as Communications-Based Train Control, or C.B.T.C., will allow trains to operate more reliably. It will also enable transit workers to monitor train traffic more closely from a dedicated room in Midtown Manhattan, known as the operations control center.
But switching to that signal system requires upgrading the rest of the subway’s archaic equipment. “In order to run more trains, we need more power,” Mr. Torres-Springer said.
For Mr. Jacobs, 36, who joined the M.T.A. nearly two decades ago as an electrical apprentice, working with machines younger than him would be a welcome change.
Today he runs a department of almost 400 people, and much of the work remains hands-on: diagnosing problems in the machinery by reading small flags with numbered codes, searching for replacement parts that are no longer manufactured, and generally eking out more life from obsolete machines.
“I do love this equipment,” he said with a smile.
But he’s ready for an upgrade to something built in this century.
“It’s like a B.M.W. versus a 1940 Cadillac.”
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