NYC Business Owners Cautiously Remove Plywood From Storefronts

By Yehudit Garmaise

  The thousands of business owners who boarded up their storefronts in New York City before the presidential election, now are starting to feel safe enough to take down the plywood.

   New York City even has companies that now specialize in installing plywood for business owners who are fearful of looters and rioters who vandalize, damage, and steal from local businesses.

 After the protesting, rioting, and looting that occurred after George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis on May 25, New York City business owners feared an “encore” in the event that a large segment of the city was not happy with the outcome of the presidential election.

  Although many New York City business owners have started to remove the plywood in their windows, many business owners report that they are keeping their plywood close by, “just in case.”

   “We’ve had a couple small incidents, but overwhelming [the response of people to the election] has been overwhelmingly positive,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea told NY1News.

   One New York City store owner said, “The city of New York was very happy and very alive, so I felt like I we didn’t need it anymore.”

  Although many New York City Democrats merely celebrated in the streets, without social distancing, over the weekend, the sight of plywood in a large range of storefronts, from mom and pop-owned stores to the most high-end departments stores, belied the oft-repeated notion that the protests since May have been “mostly-peaceful.”

  One reason that the country watched and heard rioting and looting, but those activities were mostly characterized in the mainstream press as “protests,” was the fact that the Associated Press Stylebook, a handbook for language usage for reporters, this year “instructs journalists to eschew the word ‘riot’ in favor of ‘protest,’ no matter how violent or destructive the unrest,” wrote Yonason Rosenblum in Mishpacha Magazine. “’Looting’ is also racist, according to the AP, and only distracts form the underlying grievances of the looters.”

  The ubiquity of the store’s plywood in New York City and across the country, however, revealed the precautions storeowners were taking as the anticipated the possible that President Donald Trump would be re-elected.

   After the win of President-elect Joe Biden, all that happened were non-socially distanced celebrations in the streets, which took place without comment or rebuke by Mayor Bill de Blasio, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, any of the city’s top Health Department doctors, or practically anyone in the press.