Like so many jazz clubs and music venues across the city, it’s been shuttered on West 44th Street since the pandemic began last March, except for a brief reopening last month.
Online Campaigns to Save New York s Theaters, Businesses
January 16, 2021
Steve Olsen, the owner of the West Bank Café, reads the specials over the phone to a customer in the empty restaurant. Photo taken on Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)
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New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood is filled with restaurants and other businesses that are now closed. Nearby, Broadway theaters are also dark because of COVID-19 suspensions.
The coronavirus crisis caused great economic difficulties for all these businesses. But some well-loved areas have received financial support to help them survive the difficulties. People are continuing
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It is hard to imagine New York City without jazz, which has been a central element of the city s cultural profile for a century. But the shutdown has hit NYC s performance venues hard. The East Side’s Jazz Standard closed for good in December, and music lovers fear that the essential midtown venue Birdland might be forced to follow this year unless a new campaign to rescue the club raises enough money to keep it going through the lean times ahead.
A GoFundMe campaign to save the nightclub was set up last week, and the response has been highly encouraging: The drive has already raised $200,000 toward its goal. Now a virtual concert will follow on Sunday, January 24, with a major lineup of stars eager to lend a hand. Birdland was the world s greatest jazz club in the 1950s, and it is the world s greatest jazz club today,” says the jazz and cabaret historian James Gavin. “The air vibrates with history, both bygone and in the making. Birdland defines the exciteme
It is a lonely walk along Ninth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan these days. A neighborhood once brimming with life shows signs of wear, tear, and weakness, as storefront after storefront displays signs of dereliction. Favorite restaurants have shuttered, Mom and Pop shops have closed, and local businesses have failed to survive. These are the corona closures that represent a once-thriving district of New York City. If they are lucky, the passersby only look upon walls of glass camouflaged by butcher paper, while the sadder establishments remain exposed for all to see a lone table in the middle of the room while an A-Frame sign collecting dust rests up against a bar, and mail shoved under the door scattered across the dirty floor. This disconsolate sight pervades the vision of pedestrians passing through Hell s Kitchen, even though some of the luckier establishments continue to provide service and hold on for dear life.