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Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2020 8 pages • Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint Vol. 43, No. 14 • April 3–9, 2020
MAKING IT WORK
The Atlantic Basin and Red Hook Cruise Terminal could be accepting patients by mid April.
Wanted: Furry company
Brooklynites foster pets en masse amid COVID-19 outbreak
Courtesy of Gabrielle Puglia
Gabrielle Puglia and her boyfriend Frank
Pesce with their fostered pooch Huck.
Huck, is just one of a hundreds of animals
who have been fostered or adopted during
the coronavirus pandemic.
MORE ON THE CORONAVIRUS
Congresswoman Velazquez announces she likely
has COVID-19 PAGE 3
Cuomo’s proposed budget includes $38M in cuts
to Brooklyn hospitals PAGE 3
Citi Bike offering free rides for essential workers
during COVID-19 crisis PAGE 4
Cuomo postpones Bushwick Council race to June
23 due to coronavirus PAGE 5
STAY INFORMED. Get daily updates by signing up for
email newsletters at: BrooklynPaper.com/updates
By Ben Verde
Brooklyn Paper
The cavernous Brooklyn Cruise Terminal
will be transformed into a field
hospital in the near future, Governor
Andrew Cuomo announced on March
27, as New York State rushes to increase
its hospital capacity while cases of the
coronavirus skyrocket.
The cruise terminal in Red Hook’s
Clinton Wharf will add 1,000 beds to the
state’s roster, as it attempts to increase its
hospital capacity from roughly 53,000
to 140,000 before the outbreak’s peak,
which officials estimate could only be
three weeks away.
Along with the cruise terminal, Cuomo
announced a number of other field hospitals
in the outer boroughs and suburbs.
“I want to have one in every borough,”
the governor said. “I want to have one
for The Bronx, Queens, Staten Island,
Brooklyn.”
Two field hospitals are currently in
place in Manhattan, after the arrival of
the USNS Comfort on Monday and the
installation of 1,000 beds in the Javits
Center by the National Guard within
one week.
The Downtown Brooklyn Marriott
and Brooklyn Center Nursing Home in
Crown Heights are also being considered
as field hospital locations, according
to Cuomo.
Local elected officials, who had been
lobbying the state for weeks to utilize
more Brooklyn locations for field hospitals,
commended the decision.
“This is an ‘all-in’ moment, perhaps
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A trio of Brooklyn Navy Yard companies
are producing tens of thousands
of medical face shields to protect the
city’s health workers against the novel
coronavirus, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced
on March 26.
The firms began making the protective
headwear out of an impromptu
factory in a hangar on the grounds of
the Fort Greene industrial park, bringing
more than a hundred of the companies’
employees back to work after
their businesses shut down due to the
pandemic outbreak, according to one
manufacturing bigwig.
“Last week I was laying off staff and
shutting down my factory and on Saturday
afternoon, we started developing
face shields that were approved by
DOH,” said Michael Bednark, the chief
executive officer of Bednark Studios,
a fabrication company that normally
creates pop up shops and installations
for brands like Nike and Google.
Bednark partnered with Duggal,
another Navy Yard firm that prints
photographs and produces other visual
installations, as well as co-working
space company Newlab.
None of the three companies previously
produced the protective gear,
but they worked with city Health Department
officials to make sure their
Thanks!
Locals leaving
grateful words
for hospital
By Jessica Parks
Brooklyn Paper
Brooklyn’s 300,000-plus public
school students started remote
learning on March 23, marking an
enormous shift in the city’s education
system — and parents and
teachers have been working overtime
to help bring the classroom
into students’ homes.
“It’s a new reality for the 1.1
Photos by Lorraine Carita
This anonymous message, along with others, was found
outside Maimonides Medical Center.
million students and families in
New York City,” said Mayor Bill
de Blasio. “We are literally flying
the plane as we’re building
the plane. So, not everything is
going to go 100 percent as plan,
but that’s okay because we’ll figure
it out together.”
While parents prepped their
homes for learning, public school
teachers had just three days of
training before they were required
to take their classrooms
online on March 23 in an effort
to promote social distancing amid
the novel coronavirus outbreak —
and, while students may have enjoyed
a week-long hiatus from class
the week prior, vacation is definitely
over.
“We are holding the children
accountable. We are not saying
‘you are off now, you are on vacation,’”
said Mario Caggiano, a
union chapter leader and physical
education teacher at Coney Island’s
I.S. 303. “The children have
to check in by 9 am, so we know
they are online, they are engaged,
and they are learning.”
Educators have taken up technology
like the video-conferencing
platform Zoom to help teach
Animal Care Centers of NYC on
Sunday tweeted that more than
400 of their pets have left their
shelters either through fostering,
adoption, or via another partnering
organization.
Not only does it mean that 431
pets are resting comfortably in a
nice home, but ACC staff can now
direct their limited resources to the
pets that need it the most.
Some shelters in the Five Boroughs
are seeing an increase of as
high as 10 times their usual demand,
Bloomberg reported.
One Bay Ridge grad student
has decided to foster an adorable
students new material, and online
apps like Google Classroom
to assign and grade work — despite
the rapid tectonic change,
the new system is working well,
said Caggiano.
“I am proud of all my teachers,
they are trying their best to
make it as close as possible in an
environment to the classroom,”
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
From shelter in place to sheltering
pets!
Brooklynites have fostered
and adopted four-legged friends
en masse to keep them company
while they self-quarantine during
the ongoing coronavirus outbreak
— so much so that the owner of
one Gravesend animal rescue has
had to turn prospective pet parents
away because they’ve run out
of furballs!
“It’s very unusual,” said the
the co-founder of Angels for Mistreated
Animals, or AMA Animal
Rescue, Anna Khazanova. “More
so ever than before we have new
fosters.”
Khazanova’s Cropsey Avenue
shelter usually has between 35 to
40 animals looking for a home and
last week a client picked up their
last remaining pet amid the sudden
surge in demand.
She believes that many Kings
County animal lovers have been
motivated by the pandemic to take
care of a cat or a dog, and she
hopes that some of the new foster
parents will become adopters,
known also as “foster failures.”
“This has been the little push
they may have needed,” she said.
“We’re hoping to get some foster
failures, who win as adopters.”
Her center still receives calls
every day and demand has more
than doubled in the past weeks,
she said.
This trend is happening across
the city as the shelter organization
By Rose Adams
Brooklyn Paper
A group of Brooklynites left kind
messages outside Maimonides Medical
Center in Borough Park the
week of March 23, thanking the
hospital staff for their work during
the coronavirus pandemic.
“Thank you for showing up,”
read one of the chalk messages, accompanied
with a heart.
Hospital employees arrived for
work on March 26 to discover the
grateful messages, which were written
in chalk along the pavement outside
the hospital’s entrance on 10th
Avenue near 48th Street, according
to spokeswoman Eileen Tynion.
Inspired by the act of kindness,
staffers from the pediatrics unit
went down the block to the hospital’s
emergency room, and wrote
uplifting messages outside that
read, “We’re all in this together,”
“You are brave, you are strong,”
and “Maimo strong.”
Workers at Maimonides also took
the time to thank each other for
their hard work and boost their spirits
during the pandemic — which
has pushed the limits of local hospitals
and threatened the lives of
its workers.
“I would like to thank all of you
from the bottom of my heart for all
you have done and continue to do
for the patients in the hospital,” said
Libby, an employee who didn’t give
her last name. “I consider each and
every one of you a hero.”
Cuomo: 1,000 bed hospital coming to Red Hook Cruise Terminal
more so than at any point in our lifetimes,”
said Borough President Eric Adams.
“Every facet of government must be
working overtime to provide the medical
resources and infrastructure needed to
flatten the curve and save lives.”
The Manhattan field hospitals will not
be used to treat COVID-19 patients, the
governor said, but will be used to take some
of the load off the city’s dangerously overburdened
hospital system. Officials have
not yet indicated whether the Brooklyn
field hospital will have the same use.
Statewide, the count of confirmed cases
has shot to over 65,000, with 1,200 deaths,
and the governor says he is expecting
things to get worse before the peak.
Brooklyn hospitals are among those
struggling to meet the enormous demand.
Staff at Brookdale Hospital, which has
over 100 confirmed COVID-19 cases as of
this weekend, described the situation as a
“war zone” in a recent CNN report.
And space-strapped hospitals have
had to resort to storing the bodies of
the deceased in refrigerated trucks outside,
File photo by Tom Fox
as captured in a disturbing video,
which shows hospital staff using a forklift
to load the cadavers onto a trailer
outside the Brooklyn Hospital Center
in Fort Greene.
Meanwhile, state officials are in a
race against time to add as many additional
beds as possible.
“We are doing everything we can,”
Cuomo said. “We are doing things that,
when we put them on the table, people
thought they were impossible. But we
are now doing the impossible.”
Workers making face shields in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Photo by Kevin Duggan
Industries adapt
Navy Yard companies producing
face shields for city hospitals
Teachers, parents tackling remote learning
two-year-old black pit bull named
Huck to take care of in the coming
months as she faces studying
and working from home.
“I’ve always wanted a dog, but
with school and work there wasn’t
time,” said Gabrielle Puglia. “If
I’m going to be stuck, I might as
well give someone else a home
so they’re not stuck at home too
— this one just kind of fell into
my lap.”
When Puglia went to pick up
the pooch at the Animal Care
Center’s Brooklyn outpost in
East New York on March 21,
she said that all of the shelter’s
cats and smaller dogs were already
taken. She’s happy to have
found Huck, who she says has
been a real pal.
“He’s is the sweetest dog ever,
I’ve had dogs before and none has
been this much of a lap dog,” Puglia
said.
She and her boyfriend, Frank,
have already grown attached to the
handsome hound and it will be bittersweet
to hand him over to an
adopting family, she said.
“It’s going to be so hard to let
him go,” she said. “He’s really
pretty so I don’t think he’ll have
any trouble getting adopted.”
See NAVY YARD on page 5
See SCHOOLS on page 4
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