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March 27-April 2, 2020
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Elana Gartner Golden and David Golden sang with their daughter from their Bergen Street house. Photo by Rose Adams
Quarantine karaoke
Brooklynites join together in song while locked down
BY ROSE ADAMS
Hundreds of Brooklynites
gathered on their rooftops and
stoops on Thursday evening for
a borough-wide sing-along that
featured American classics,
such as “Sweet Caroline” and “I
Will Survive.”
“The idea is for folks to disconnect
from their devices and
connect with their community,”
said JJ Berney, a Park
Slope resident who organized
the sing-along to bring locals together
during the coronavirus
outbreak. “In this environment
we can’t touch people with our
hands, but we can touch people
with our voices.”
Berney said he decided to
start the “Sing-alone sing-along”
after his friend in Italy told him
about how Italians took to their
balconies to play music — bringing
residents together during
the country-wide lockdown.
“They found a way to release
the tension and be with people in a
way they couldn’t before,” said Berney.
“I found that pretty powerful.”
Berney started a Facebook
event called the “Brownstone
Brooklyn COVID-19 Singalone
(Singalong)” on Thursday morning,
and it quickly gained traction.
By the sing-along’s start
time at 6:30 pm, nearly 400 people
had marked themselves “attending”
and nearly 900 said
they were “interested.” Participants
posted their cross streets
on the event page to encourage
their neighbors to join them.
To make sure everyone sang
the same songs in unison, singers
assembled a list of popular
tunes in a shared Google Document,
which Berney turned into
a karaoke playlist on YouTube.
One participant, who sang with
her husband and daughter from
their Bergen Street stoop, said the
event helped relieve her anxiety
from the coronavirus outbreak.
“I know that singing helps
the soul and I really needed help
for the soul right now. I wanted
to feel like I was a part of a community,”
said Elana Gartner
Golden. “Even though my neighbors
didn’t participate, we saw
some of them and it made some
people smile. We all need smiles
right now. It’s the only way we’re
going to make it through.”
Berney, who sang on his rooftop
with his family, heard about
six other households crooning
around him. He said he wasn’t
surprised by the event’s popularity,
and said he’s planning another
sing-along this weekend.
“We’re going to try to do
it again Saturday or Sunday
night,” he said, explaining that
he’s trying to fi nd a way to connect
participants via a live video
stream. “I would expect the
numbers of singers are going to
get larger.”
COVID-19
INFECTS
BKLYN
Confi rmed cases
surpass 4,000
BY BEN VERDE
Confi rmed cases of the novel
coronavirus in Kings County
shot into the thousands this week,
as New York City has become the
epicenter of the outbreak in the
United States.
Out of over 17,000 cases within
the fi ve boroughs, over 4,000 are in
Brooklyn, which is second only to
Queens in the number of confi rmed
cases per borough. Citywide, over
200 people have been killed.
Fifty-eight percent of the cases
within New York State are in New
York City, and one-third of the cases
nationwide are in New York State.
“I don’t want to be the epicenter,
but we are the epicenter,”
Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
Statewide, offi cials say they
are unprepared for the massive
swell of cases all at once, and that
the rate of infection is doubling
roughly every three days.
“We haven’t fl attened the
curve,” Governor Andrew Cuomo
said March 24. “And the curve is
actually increasing.”
Local offi cials’ pleas to the federal
government have grown more
urgent day by day — and have
started to see small results, such as
the delivery of 4,000 badly needed
respirators to New York State, 2,000
of which will go to the city.
While the state has begun work
to install a thousand hospital beds
in Manhattan’s Javits Center — no
plans for temporary hospital expansions
have been announced for
Kings County, with offi cials calls
for the repurposing of the boroughs
available unused spaces so
far going ignored.
“We cannot forget about
Brooklyn,” said Borough President
Eric Adams.
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