The pandemic party’s definition has been flexible, depending on your own personal COVID boundaries and how judgmental (or jealous) you are of those who flout the rules. In July and August, a small park under the Kosciuszko Bridge became infamous for its giant parties, one of which was billed as a Black Lives Matter fund-raiser, according to Gothamist. In their most flagrant pandemic-defying jubilance, party organizers have staged warehouse ragers, spreading the word via Instagram about indoor and outdoor all-night events with rotating DJs and unlicensed bars. This illicit summer saw a Bushwick brownstone that threw enough parties to be declared the “Illmore,” along with crowded outdoor park events that took place in the light of day. For every good bottle of Champagne consumed on a Manhattan rooftop, there was a handle of Taaka vodka being passed around a circle somewhere. There were Meatpacking table-service affairs that required shelling out a few grand for a couple of seats and hotel parties in Long Island City that mandated a dubious COVID test for entry. There were boat parties, pool parties, karaoke parties, sex parties, silent-disco parties, park parties, house parties, warehouse parties, and roof parties. Through executive order, Governor Cuomo had shut down all nonessential businesses and gatherings regardless of size.īy late July, when positivity rates lingered around 1.5 percent and the orders were eased to allow gatherings of up to 50 people, the underground party scene was as rich and varied as the aboveground one used to be. By that time, the virus was infecting 3,000 city residents a day, and the death toll had exceeded 10,000. On April 20, the NYPD busted a party of 38 people celebrating the holiday with a smoke at 4:20 p.m. Even in April, as the virus swept through the city at a ferocious pace, stories circulated about secret events organized through Instagram DMs and held in private lofts, shuttered clubs, and emptied warehouses. Partying in New York never really stopped. “Oh no! Please! Do keep it,” I tell her, and she seems to take it as a sign of generosity, rather than a desire to avoid exchanging saliva with a complete stranger in the middle of a global pandemic. A few puffs later, she offers it back to me. “What is this?” she asks incredulously, though it’s just a Marlboro. “What are you smoking? Want to switch?” says a woman in leopard-print tights, grabbing my cigarette and offering her e-something in return, which I politely decline. If you happened to wander into this party, lured from the street by the muffled sound of electronic dance music bumping off the walls of the 2,000-square-foot space, you might have thought it was 2019 again, when the bottom halves of our faces were left unadorned by swaths of fabric and sharing something you smoke, something you drink, or someone you sleep with didn’t put your life in danger. On the teeny back patio of a vacant industrial warehouse on the border of Bushwick and Williamsburg, at a covert party named, fittingly, “Dirty Dark Underground,” I can find only one person out of a couple dozen revelers who appears to even own a mask, though his is currently dangling under his chin. It’s 2 a.m., or, per the guy sitting next to me, “the hour where nothing is awkward,” on a Friday night less than two weeks before the presidential election and three weeks before COVID-19 positivity rates would creep back toward 3 percent in New York, prompting a series of new lockdown measures - a night and moment that, in retrospect, would be the twilight of New York’s pandemic reprieve. A rooftop party in Bushwick on September 26.
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