This is what 2020 looked like in the Big Apple.
Even as many New Yorkers hunkered down inside amid the COVID-19 pandemic, wild protests and strict curfews, the Post’s photographers were out on the streets capturing an unprecedented year.
Here are some of their best snaps — and the stories behind them:
Fans flocked to Madison Square Garden to pay tribute to basketball legend Kobe Bryant, after he died in a helicopter crash on Jan. 26. The arena was lit up with purple and gold — Bryant’s team colors for the Los Angeles Lakers — and a moment of silence was held before the Knicks took on the Nets that night.
A few months after snapping this photo, longtime Post sports photographer Anthony Causi tragically passed away after a battle with COVID-19 at age 48. He was honored by many local sports teams, including the Yankees, Mets, Jets and Giants.
In an attempt to ease anxieties about the then-emerging coronavirus in mid-February, Mayor de Blasio chowed down on Chinese food at the New World Mall in Flushing, Queens. But Hizzoner — who has a history of food-related gaffes — struggled to use chopsticks, dropping chunks of food before grabbing a fork. At one point, he picked up a piece of dim sum and ate it with his hands.
After the office for an embattled homeless outreach program was quietly shuttered inside Penn Station in February, dozens of vagrants were spotted milling around the transit hub. A city contract with the pricey Bowery Residents Committee was nevertheless renewed in June.
On March 11, disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years behind bars for rape and a criminal sex act. The Post exclusively snapped the 67-year-old — who suffered from back problems during the trial — being wheeled out of Manhattan Supreme Court in a wheelchair and off to the slammer.
As the COVID-19 crisis raged in mid-April, The Post spent a full day shadowing Elizabeth “Liz” Moyano — a nurse at St. Mary’s General Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey — in her fight to save lives. “[I’ve] never experienced anything so devastating,” the 47-year-old health care veteran said.
The pandemic hit New York City so hard in late March that there was no room in some funeral homes to store bodies — forcing workers to load corpses into refrigerated trucks with forklifts. Grim footage showed medical officials transporting bodies outside Brooklyn Hospital Center in Fort Greene.
Dozens of city firefighters gathered to cheer for front-line medical workers at a hospital in Manhattan in early April — as New York’s COVID-19 death toll surpassed that of the 9/11 terror attacks. New York’s bravest gave nurses a standing ovation outside NYU Langone in Kips Bay. “We love you!” one of them shouted.
The City that Never Sleeps became the city that never commutes, as transit hubs sat nearly empty in April. Citing fears over the coronavirus, many New Yorkers avoided subways and terminals, including Grand Central. “Nobody wants to go out and be in a crowded place because they think they will get infected,” a worker in Times Square told the Post.
Senior citizens used everything from music to religion to cope in the frightening early months of the pandemic, they told the Post. Jane Varkell, 81, started self-isolating in her Greenwich Village apartment on March 6 because she has a breathing condition. “[It’s] a challenge to get through,” she said of being away from family.
On April 30, the floating hospital President Trump sent to help New York cope with the coronavirus crisis sailed away from the city after a month. The USNS Comfort docked in the Big Apple to support hospitals flooded with coronavirus patients — though ultimately very few were sent there, much to the frustration of medical workers.
The Post’s exclusive look inside one Brooklyn hospital in April revealed more than twice the normal number of patients in a packed Intensive Care Unit. In a rare calm moment, a nurse was seen taking a break outside Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park.
Pandemic-weary New Yorkers escaping to greenspaces as the weather got warmer in May were kept apart by social distancing circles painted on a turf field at Domino Park in Brooklyn. Dubbed “human parking spots,” one park-goer griped that they looked fit for a “near-future Hollywood dystopian television show.”
A protest over the police killing of George Floyd became violent in Brooklyn as demonstrators set fire to an empty police vehicle and threw glass bottles at cops on May 30. An hour-long standoff with 100 police officers in riot-gear erupted into a cloud of mace in East Flatbush as protesters chanted, “Black lives matter!”
On June 4, cops faced off against protesters in the Bronx while enforcing an 8 p.m. curfew — and making dozens of arrests. Thousands of protesters had previously defied the curfew during the eighth day of citywide protests against police brutality.
Fresh out of jail and supposedly on home confinement, President Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen was spotted eating out at a French restaurant in Manhattan in July. Cohen and his wife, Laura, chowed down at a sidewalk table outside Le Bilboquet in Midtown. A lawyer for Cohen — who was allowed home from his three-year prison sentence due to coronavirus concerns — claimed he hadn’t violated any conditions of his release.
Citi Field re-opened in July — equipped with hand-sanitizing stations — exactly 113 days after the coronavirus outbreak shut down spring training in March. Mets catcher Rene Rivera helped himself to a squirt on the first day of the team’s long-awaited return.
The Fourth of July weekend turned bloody in the Big Apple, with at least five people fatally shot over a span of just a few hours. One of the shootings, on Pitkin Avenue and Atkins Avenue in East New York, was followed by a burst of illegal fireworks.
The mother of 1-year-old Davell Gardner — who was killed in a gang-related shooting during a cookout in Broooklyn — wept over the tragedy on her stoop in July. Her son was shot in the stomach near a playground in Bedford-Stuyvesant during a surge in gun violence citywide.
Occupy City Hall demonstrators spent a month camped outside the municipal building to protest the police killing of George Floyd. One of them — former jailbird Luis de Jesus — said he joined the movement because he lost his job. “I got laid off, so I’m here now,” he told The Post.
As the Occupy camp continued in late June, vandals targeted Lower Manhattan courthouse with anti-cop spray paint, forcing workers to remove it. “Euthanize Swine,” the graffiti on Surrogate’s Courthouse read.
Scores of Manhattan shops and restaurants went out of business amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving storefronts empty and boarded up. A September report found there were at least 335 vacant storefronts on Broadway.
City teachers protested “unsafe” classrooms, camping out in front of buildings and vowing to walk-out if Mayor Bill de Blasio resumed in-class learning. During one demonstration in September, teachers worked on laptops outside Public School 139 in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.
Hundreds of members of an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn took to the streets in October to protest coronavirus-related restrictions on synagogues, schools and non-essential businesses. The furious Borough Park residents defied orders to disperse, and and lit a small fire to protest the state-mandated measures.
Hundreds of thousands of New York City residents flocked to the polls to cast early ballots for the next US president, causing long lines in early November. One queue outside the Kaufman Studios in Queens stretched around the block in the rain.
Many New Yorkers took to the streets to celebrate after media outlets called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on Nov. 7. In Manhattan, revelers danced and waved flags from Times Square to Washington Square Park.
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