Mobile vaccine buses to off er shot at city
beaches and parks Memorial Day weekend
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Call it vax on the beach!
The city will roll out a fl eet
of mobile COVID-19 vaccine
buses to beaches and popular
parks starting this Memorial
Day weekend, Mayor Bill de
Blasio announced May 25.
“This is an example of
bringing the vaccine to the
COURIER L 40 IFE, MAY 28-JUNE 3, 2021
people and making it easier
than ever,” de Blasio said at
his May 25 daily press briefing.
“We’re going to combine
the joy of summer and the
beaches reopening with the
vaccination effort.”
New Yorkers will be able to
get their shot while enjoying
the unoffi cial start of summer
as the city beaches open Saturday
as well as some other gathering
hotspots:
• Coney Island
• Brighton Beach
• Rockaways
• Orchard Beach
• Brooklyn Bridge Park
• Central Park
• Flushing Meadows Corona
Park
• Prospect Park
• Governors Island
The city is poised to pass
the 8 million threshold for vaccines
administered Tuesday,
with 7,999,257 shots in arms as
of the morning, hizzoner said.
“Talk about the need for us
all to heal and move forward,
here’s an example of it in real
time,” the mayor said. “This
vaccination effort involved
tens of thousands of people
helping their fellow New Yorkers
from all over the city, all
walks of life, all neighborhoods.”
The latest indicators as of
May 23 show a COVID-19 positivity
rate for the city of 1.1 percent,
with a seven-day average
of 411 new reported cases per
day and a hospitalization rate
of 0.79 per 100,000.
“We’re on the verge of the
summer, it’s a summer we deserve
after everything we’ve
been through,” said de Blasio.
“It will be the summer of New
York City, it will be extraordinary.”
BY JESSICA PARKS
The 154th iteration of
Brooklyn’ Memorial Day Parade
will go on as a motorcade
for the second year in a row
— though it will be slightly
larger than last year’s event.
“Now that we have all this
under our belts, we’re expanding
it a little,” said Raymond
Aalbue, organizer of Brooklyn’s
Memorial Day Parade
and executive director of
United Military Veterans of
Kings County.
All are welcome to join
the procession through Bay
Ridge— the parade’s venue
for the last 30 years— though
veterans will be given fi rst
priority at the front of the motorcade.
Participants are encouraged
to decorate their
cars with American fl ags and
patriotic banners, Aalbue
said.
A Memorial Day fl oat will
be reintroduced this year and
will will be decked out with
banners for all the different
veteran service organizations,
which will serve as this
year’s Grand Marshal, as well
as World War 2 veteran David
Vogel, who fought in the Mariana
Islands, from Connecticut.
The motorcade will begin
at 75th Street and Third Avenue
in Bay Ridge at 11 am and
will then make its way to the
Brooklyn Veterans Hospital
on Poly Place in neighboring
Dyker Heights via Marine Avenue,
Fort Hamilton Parkway,
92nd Street and Seventh Avenue
respectively.
Everyone is then invited to
head over to John Paul Jones
Park, where the organizers are
hosting a ceremony, starting
around 1pm, that will include
a playing of taps, a laying of
wreaths and fl ag raising.
While current restrictions
would probably allow for a parade,
the organizing group did
not have the time to prepare an
event so large-scale, Aalbue
told Brooklyn Paper, as there
was no way to foresee the sudden
reversal of most coronavirus
restrictions when they
began planning back in September.
“Now we would have like
to have a parade, like we normally
do,” Aaslbue said, “but
it was just too late. We started
planning our parade in September,
October last year. We
have fl oats and bands and stuff
like that so it was diffi cult for
us to put together a parade.”
The Memorial Day Parade
has had its home in Bay Ridge
for over 30 years, with its fi rst
inception in 1867 on Eastern
Parkway, where it was held
for a number of years before a
brief tenure in Park Slope and
Windsor Terrace on Prospect
Park West.
Brooklyn’s Memorial Day
Parade was founded just after
the end of the Civil War, when
veterans from the battles between
the Union and the Confederacy
joined forces with
alumni of previous wars to remember
those who died.
Aalbue has been organizing
the parade for 28 years
and said he feels it his responsibility
to honor his brothers
and sisters who were in combat.
He is a veteran from the
Vietnam War-era himself, but
wasn’t sent into combat, and
was instead stationed in Okinawa,
Japan and Korea.
“I was in the military during
the Vietnam War, and they
didn’t send me to Vietnam,”
Aalbue told Brooklyn Paper.
“So one of the things I think
I do this for is to remember
all of those men and women
who died, over 58,000 men and
women who died in Vietnam,
because I could have been in
Vietnam, who knows.”
This Memorial Day will be
particularly signifi cant, Aalbue
said, as this year marks
the 30th anniversary since the
Gulf War, and especially poignant
to New Yorkers, coming
up to the 20th anniversary of
September 11.
Vax on the beach
Bay Ridge’s annual Memorial Day
celebration continues as motorcade
BROOKLYN
Still remembering
JUST ADD VACCINES: People enjoying
summer fun on the beach in
Coney Island in 2020.
File photo by Todd Maisel
Veterans wave from the motorcade for 2020’s scaled-back Memorial Day
Parade in Bay Ridge. File photo