It was still a few hours before New York City would fall under a historic curfew on Monday night, but Mayor Bill de Blasio could already see that it was not working.
Demonstrators had been amassing for several days to protest the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The 11 p.m. cutoff on Monday effectively pushed peaceful protesters off the streets, but it seemed to do little to deter those who looted large parts of Midtown Manhattan and a slice of the Bronx.
If anything, the curfew seemed to cause them to start earlier.
As a result, the mayor decided to move the start time of the curfew to 8 p.m., announcing his decision in an interview on NY1. By Tuesday morning, Mr. de Blasio said he would extend that 8 p.m. curfew, New York City’s first since World War II, through Sunday night.
The decision to institute the curfew was laden with political and strategic considerations, and once again opened a window into the fraught relationship between the mayor and his fellow Democrat, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
But it also revealed the willingness of state and city leaders to consider extraordinary measures — a solution of some kind to a level of pandemonium on city streets that longtime New York leaders said had no recent parallel.
“There’s nobody alive today in law enforcement — and I’ve been around since the late ’60s — nobody has seen anything like this in this country,” said Wiliam J. Bratton, Mr. de Blasio’s first police commissioner.
Richard Ravitch, 86, a former New York State lieutenant governor, said that although there were riots in the 1960s, “it was nowhere near what was happening in New York City now.”
Sid Davidoff, now one of the city’s top lobbyists, was a personal aide to Mayor John V. Lindsay the night the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Even that tragedy, he said, as well as the unrest it prompted, does not compare to what he is seeing today.
“It wasn’t as angry,” said Mr. Davidoff, who has also advised Mr. de Blasio. “It was mourning.”
It is not at all clear, however, if the earlier curfew will deter widespread crime or better empower the police to restore order to areas targeted by looters. Among the many doubters are Mr. Bratton, who described curfews as “symbolic,” and Donovan Richards, a Queens councilman who leads the City Council’s public safety committee. Mr. Richards worried that the curfew enforcement would fall most heavily on essential workers of color.
“My father is a commercial cleaner,” Mr. Richards said. “He works up to 11 p.m. Someone like him will have to deal with a curfew — a black man in the middle of Manhattan. I certainly have concerns.”
The last time New York City was under curfew was in February 1945. Fiorello H. La Guardia was mayor. Franklin D. Roosevelt was president. The Allied forces had just bombed Dresden, Germany, and the United States was facing a coal shortage. The director of war mobilization imposed a nationwide midnight curfew on all “places of entertainment.” It lasted until May.
Seventy-five years and 10 mayors later — as late-night violence hijacked otherwise peaceful demonstrations, as people looted the Macy’s flagship store, as parts of the Bronx were again burning — Mr. de Blasio took a page out of Mr. Roosevelt’s book.
The decision to establish a curfew did not come easily.
As recently as May 31, Mr. de Blasio was telling reporters that a curfew was unlikely, even as they were being imposed in large cities around the country.
Sunday night changed his mind. Looters shattered plate-glass windows in the Flatiron district and SoHo, and stole what they found inside. They set scaffolding on fire.
The next morning, before his regularly scheduled press briefing, the mayor and his current police commissioner, Dermot F. Shea, broached the idea of a curfew.
At the same time, the governor’s office was expressing alarm.
“On Monday morning, we reached out and said, we are very, very concerned that what you are doing is not working in the city to maintain order,” one state official said.
Later that afternoon, the mayor conferred with Mr. Shea and Mr. Cuomo. He decided that a curfew would begin at 11 p.m. The news was then divulged by the governor during a local radio interview in Albany.
That evening, Mr. de Blasio was on the ground as the protests kicked off and the looting began.
“He saw the situation had escalated earlier in the night than it had on Sunday and there was more looting overall,” said Freddi Goldstein, the mayor’s press secretary.
So Mr. de Blasio made what she said was an “immediate decision” to start the curfew at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. He and Mr. Shea later decided to extend the curfew though the end of the week, Ms. Goldstein said. Neither decision was discussed with the governor.
David N. Dinkins, the former New York City mayor who presided over the last major spate of civil unrest in the city — four days of interracial violence in Crown Heights, Brooklyn — said he had no advice or counsel to offer the current mayor but he expressed apprehension about the unrest.
“The language I would use is ‘concerned,’” Mr. Dinkins said. “Rodney King comes to mind. Tough times.”
Kathryn S. Wylde, president and chief executive of the nonprofit Partnership for New York City, said the future of the city might well depend on the mayor getting this right.
“One very prominent business owner said to me this morning, ‘This is far worse than Covid,’” Ms. Wylde said. The business owner works in private equity. “This is the first time through this whole thing that he’s thought of closing shop and moving out of New York.”
“And if we can’t stop this, there will be a mass exodus,” she added.
Mr. de Blasio is in the toughest situation that any modern mayor of New York City has ever been through, Mr. Davidoff said.
And the situation is likely to last a good while longer.
Mr. Bratton predicted that the civil unrest precipitating the curfew was likely to last until the June 9 funeral of Mr. Floyd.
“This is clearly going to run for another week or 10 days,” Mr. Bratton said.
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