Some Masks to Come Off in New York

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. We’ll look at a turning point in New York’s pandemic response that Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to announce today. We’ll also look at a former bank in Lower Manhattan that will soon be home to an immersive art exhibitions.

With a winter surge in coronavirus cases receding, Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to drop the state’s strict indoor mask mandate.

She is expected to announce that she will not renew a rule directing businesses to require customers to wear masks and to check for customers’ proof of vaccination. She imposed the rule in December as case counts soared, fueled by the Omicron variant. That rule, which prompted legal challenges, expires on Thursday.

It was unclear whether she would extend or eliminate a separate mask mandate for schools that expires in two weeks.

[Dropping Indoor Mask Mandate, New York Joins Blue States Easing Covid Rules]

Letting New York’s indoor mask mandate run out could make routines seem more normal for stores and restaurants, as well as companies struggling to bring office workers back to their desks. It comes in the wake of similar announcements in Democratic-led states, including New Jersey and California, that were the product of a loosely coordinated effort after months of back-channel discussions and political focus groups. The upshot was that a growing portion of the public was ready to live with the risk that remains. The daily average of new cases in New York State stood at 7,143 on Monday, slightly less than 10 percent of the daily average at the peak of the Omicron surge on Jan. 11.

But New Yorkers would still have to wear masks in some places. The end of the state mask mandate would not change federal requirements for masks on airplanes, buses and trains, as well as in hospitals and nursing homes.

Also, it remains unclear whether localities with their own mask rules would follow Hochul’s lead, easing or eliminating their restrictions.

In New York City, for example, proof of vaccination is required to dine indoors, go to movies or sports events, and work out at gyms. That requirement has been in place through a program called “Key to NYC” that began under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. City officials said on Tuesday that the order was being renewed.

Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mayor Eric Adams, said the administration would not comment on possible policy changes until Hochul had made a formal announcement on her mask mandate.

Hochul’s mandate prompted a backlash from local officials in conservative and rural pockets of the state where masks were less than popular. The mandate also led to a political flare-up on Long Island. Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who was elected county executive in Nassau County in November, directed county agencies to stop enforcing mask mandates. After Justice Thomas Rademaker of State Supreme Court in Nassau County nullified part of the mask mandate in December, an appeals court ruled last month that the mandate could remain in effect.

Weather

Look for a bright, sunny day with temps in the mid-40s. Clouds will appear in the evening with temps in the mid-30s.

alternate-side parking

In effect until Saturday (Lincoln’s Birthday).

The latest New York news

• A New York couple was charged with conspiring to launder $3.6 billion in Bitcoin stolen from one of the world’s largest virtual currency exchanges in 2016.

• After surviving two wars, the Nazi invasion of Hungary and the Holocaust, a 99-year-old man died after being hit by a car on his way to synagogue.

A cube in the park? OK. A giant Velveeta box? Not OK.

First there was a square, hollow box of 24-karat gold in Central Park. Niclas Castello, the German pop artist who created it, said it took 4,500 hours to design and fabricate, roughly the same as six months of round-the-clock effort, or slightly more than two years of 40-hour workweeks.

Then there was a big rectangular box of plywood, also in the park. It had red writing spelling out the brand name Velveeta, the cheese substance that, depending on your color sense, is either bold gold or yellower than school bus yellow. It was constructed in six hours after a team from Velveeta saw the cube last week, said a spokeswoman from a Manhattan marketing and public relations company who answered emails to Kraft Heinz, the conglomerate that makes Velveeta.

The Parks Department had the Velveeta box removed once the it found out about it.

The department has an approval process for “special event concessions” that the cube had gone through. The process went somewhat faster than the 25 years it took for “The Gates” installation to win approval before it filled pathways in the park with orange-y frames draped in matching curtains in 2005. The agency said permission for the cube was granted on Dec. 9.

The Velveeta box, by contrast, just appeared on the walk near the Naumburg Bandshell. It was “unsanctioned,” said a Parks Department spokeswoman, Anessa Hodgson. No one had sought the city’s permission for it to be there.

No one paid for it to be there, either. The Parks Department has a fee schedule for installations. The organizers of the cube display paid $8,000 — and provided their own security team, men standing around in jackets with “security” on their backs, as if anyone could whisk the cube away in broad daylight. It weighed 410 pounds.

Some art lovers on social media saw the cube as a stunt, because Castello is planning an auction of NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. The marketing campaign for the cube included a wraparound ad with that morning’s print issue of The New York Times.

But the Parks Department called the cube art. “We have a longstanding history of welcoming permitted artwork in our parks,” Hodgson said by email, “including short-term exhibitions” that it classifies as “public events.”

What we’re reading

• The New York Public Library’s Ottendorfer branch has no fully functioning fire alarms or overhead sprinklers — and isn’t the only institution behind on upgrades, The City reports.

• A letter written by Charles Dickens in symbols, dots and scribbles sat for decades, unread in a vault in the Morgan Library & Museum. Computer programmers helped scholars decode it.

• The photographer Sue Kwon captured intimate images of the early days of New York hip-hop. The New Yorker featured some of her photos.

A permanent home for immersives

Last year brought two competing immersive van Gogh exhibitions to Manhattan, one at Pier 36 on the East River, the other at Skylight on the West Side. This year will bring an immersive exhibition of Gustav Klimt, the Austrian painter perhaps best known for extravaganzas in gold leaf.

Culturespaces, the French company behind digital shows of Klimt (and Paul Klee and others), and IMG, the big entertainment management firm, are leasing part of a former bank building near City Hall as a permanent home for immersive art. They plan to open their first exhibition there in the summer — “Klimt: Gold in Motion.” Bruno Monnier, the founder of Culturespaces, said it would be a reimagining of the immersive exhibition that opened Culturespaces’ Atelier des Lumières in Paris in 2018. Later, the Klimt show moved to a former submarine base in Bordeaux, France.

Monnier said the exhibition had been “completely adaptable at each place” — and would be adapted to the ornate former banking hall, with its towering columns and stained-glass skylights. The building was originally the Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank Building and was later owned by the city — people once paid their parking tickets where Culturespaces is planning 30-foot-high displays. “It is difficult to find a place with huge space and a strong character,” Monnier said.

Monnier, who said the exhibition space would be known as Hall des Lumières, is well aware that it is not on the Museum Mile uptown (although Stephen Flint Wood, the executive vice president and managing director of arts and entertainment events at IMG, noted that it was a short walk from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum). Monnier said the Hall des Lumières would make art accessible to people who might not make it to Fifth Avenue.

“After this first discovery,” he said, “they can go to the museums and know what Klimt is.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Seeing Shep

Dear Diary:

It was summer 1957. I was 12, and my family had sold our candy store on Second Avenue at St. Marks Place because we were moving to Florida.

My older sister was living in an apartment on Christopher Street. I took the BMT in from Brooklyn to spend the weekend with her. She had initiated me into the world of Jean Shepherd on WOR. We loved to listen to him and his stories.

On Sunday, we walked over to Washington Square. I didn’t know it, my sister was taking me to a sports car rally — and Shep was the rally steward!

I couldn’t believe I was seeing him in person. He was only a voice on the radio to me. And here was that voice coming out of that man’s mouth.

The only word to describe it was his motto: “Excelsior.”

— Marc Goldfeder

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Geordon Wollner, Olivia Parker and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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