Editor’s Note: COVID-19 killed tens of thousands in the Northeast, caused massive unemployment and wrecked the economy. In an ongoing series of stories, the USA TODAY Network Atlantic Group, 37 news sites including APP.com, examines what the government got wrong in its response to the virus, what policies eventually worked — and why we remain vulnerable if the coronavirus strikes harder in the fall.
Summer is the time to attend big concerts, sign up for theater camps, meet family and friends at your favorite restaurants or take a walk on your favorite merry-go-round.
The coronavirus pandemic has interrupted the New Jersey summer; Giant meetings are prohibited and indoor concerts, meals and plays are not allowed. Thousands of other people working in the state’s entertainment and restaurant industries are still unemployed.
As public fitness officials and other industries prepare for a wave of virus cases in the fall, restaurateurs, musicians and staff at bars, nightclubs and theaters are suffering the first wave of COVID-19.
“There are still a lot of paintings to be done or the whole industry is about to collapse,” said Lee Frankel, owner of Crossroads, a concert hall, a place to eat and a bar in Garwood. “Everyone came back here. It’s a terrifying moment. There is still a giant percentage of the population that is too scared to faint.”
With a tent in a courtyard, Frankel has begun organizing acoustic displays and serving food outside, but fears that the indoor live music is still a long way off. “We’re looking to walk on water, just to do what we can,” he said.
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Jason Dermer owns Asbury Audio, a full-service production company in Farmingdale that supplies equipment, technique and production for concerts and other occasions. Normally, I would be busy this summer; Dermer is also technical director of the Asbury Park events presented through Madison Marquette, who owns and operates Stone Pony and Stone Pony Summerstage, Wonder Bar, Convention Hall and Paramount Theatre.
But summer is closed this year, the Stone Pony is closed and there’s no music in Asbury’s big halls. Like the rest of the music and entertainment industry, Dermer wonders when the concerts will return.
“It’s very hard to say, ” said Dermer. “I hope things can start in the past spring or summer (of 2021). I can get to April and May without any paint to come, but beyond that, it would be difficult.”
Dermer considers himself lucky because he still paints for Madison Marquette, and his company has paintings to make this summer in construction road bags and suitcases of roving band equipment.
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“It’s not a huge amount, but it’s something, ” he said.
The state’s most recent unemployment statistics tell the story of the remnants of the pandemic in New Jersey’s recreational and hotel industry.
In February, before the spread of COVID-19 led Gov. Phil Murphy to close the state, another 404,000 people were hired in recreational and hotel activities, including hotels, restaurants and bars. By April, that number had fallen 63% to 145,000.
Recovery has been slow.
In June, the recreational and hotel sector added 35,300 jobs, but remained almost 47% less than a year ago, according to state figures.
Thousands of employees of theatres, restaurants, bars and concert halls, as well as musicians and actors, are still out of work. There is no timetable for his return and many say the federal government has not done enough for the arts organizations that suffer to survive.
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Among those who are unemployed are the workers of the Ritz Theatre Company in Haddon Township.
“We stayed about a week when it all started, then we left everyone on leave and ran out of work,” said Bruce Curless, artistic director of production at the theater. “Then came the loan (Check Protection Program). They gave us unemployment, but to some extent there’s nothing we can do. We had planned the first scenario, but now we’ve passed six other scenarios.
“Who’s idea that it’s going to last that long?” said Curless, who fired himself and his staff to the fullest. “Now there’s a little bit to win.”
Dominic Roncace, president and chief operating officer of the Bergen Performing Arts Center in Englewood, said the venue plans to hold exhibits for the remainder of 2020.
“We are watching what is going on in respect to things such as a vaccine,” Roncace said. “We would consider a show in December if a couple of months down the road, there is a vaccine.”
Meanwhile, Bergen PAC is in the process of moving more than 70 who were scheduled for the theater this year.
“There’s a devastating double impact,” Roncace said. “Not only can the 70 exhibits we book not be presented, but other people who bought tickets for those exhibits can claim a refund … Most sensiblely, your sponsors and program subscribers do not have any donation or subscription programs. “
Bergen PAC has laid off 85% of its staff, he said.
The upheavals faced by Bergen PAC’s art establishments around the world.
By June 29, the country’s nonprofit arts and cultural organizations had suffered losses of about $8.4 billion to Americans for the Arts.
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The organization reported that 96% of organizations had been forced to cancel occasions for a loss of 325 million admissions and $10.3 billion in expenses similar to occasions lost through the business hearing.
It’s a similar story at Red Bank’s Count Basie Center for the Arts, which was nearing the end of a $28 million expansion when the pandemic struck.
In early July, Adam Philipson, Basie’s chief executive, said the theater wastes about $1 million a month.
“The truth is that the pandemic has left Basie in a desperate situation,” Philipson said. “Our sectors have been decimated and we want to be the beneficiaries of reinvestment through a federal stimulus program. Many sites across the country are closing their doors, and others that will succeed deserve to be identified for their dynamism. Obviously, we will want a primary fundraising effort or a miracle cure to end this disease.”
New Jersey’s restaurants are also suffering to survive, with indoor food still prohibited. While some restaurants have an area to host many dinners, other places have a limited area, or not, and have limited themselves to providing takeout.
In late July, after four months of 618 Restaurant’s large indoor dining room being closed for business, co-owner Matthew Borowski took a drastic step: He knocked down the walls.
Not everything, of course, but enough to meet the expanded needs for dinner, Murphy announced earlier this month that bars and restaurants would allow visitors to serve consumers in spaces that have two of the 4 open walls. (A previous executive order prohibited restaurants from serving consumers in permanently roofed environments.)
Borowski said he took the resolution to open the dining room, adding forty-five seats to Freehold Borough’s offerings, as a rainy night can charge him thousands of dollars in sales.
Sal Asaro’s Colts Neck restaurant, Huddy’s Inn, is unique in that it has almost as much outdoor dining area as inside. This facet of your business gives you long-term hopes of the restaurant.
Before the pandemic, it could accommodate more than two hundred visitors inside. Outside, the place to eat is on about 7 acres that come with a grassy land where alcohol is allowed and a 2,000-square-foot covered bar. This allows “more than 150 people” considering social estrangement, Asaro said.
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“Our outdoor dining room was already well established before COVID arrived,” he said. “We just stepped forward and developed.”
“I feel very, very bad for restaurants that can’t accommodate outdoor diners,” he said.
Restaurants like Amy Russo Harrigan’s Toast in Montclair, where you can squeeze some tables on the sidewalk, compared to 122 internal seats. When the governor announced that domestic food would resume on July 2, a resolution that was temporarily overturned, became angry.
“It was literally going to save us,” said Russo Harrigan, who also owns restaurants in Asbury Park and Red Bank. “You have to hurry and wait, and then you think you’re going to be able to move forward a little bit.”
“We are very, very fortunate and very, very exclusive in the amount of area we have to review to return to profitability and sustainability,” Asaro told The Asbury Park Press in May. “I can see our way to recovery because of our location and the terrain where our place to eat is located. But it will be a challenge.
Huddy’s Inn won a loan from the federal payment coverage program, three-quarters of which is used to rehire workers who had been fired. A momentary loan would help, Asaro said in July.
“This would help continue operations, contemplating whether the long term becomes a little less clear,” Asaro said. “Right now, New Jersey is in congratulations; it turns out that we are on the road to recovery. But three months ago, Florida seemed fine and now it’s a home. I think the mere perception of the unknown is very concerned about our industry.
“(The pandemic situation) continues to evolve and others in the food and entertainment sector are just looking to stick to protocol and exist,” he said. “It’s about staying in business.”
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As top restaurateurs in New Jersey, Asaro wonders why state officials are hesitation in allowing food to resume indoors.
“It turns out that there are many unequal remedies when it comes to allowing other people to come in,” he said. “In our place to eat, if we have two hundred seats and it allows us 25 (percent capacity), it’s much safer to be in our place to eat than at Walmart.”
Asaro and his huddy’s spouse, Ray Longobardi Sr., kept the company afloat with their own funds in addition to the PPP loan.
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“We’re lucky to be able to do that,” he said. “We had to issue checks, finance the business and be able to reopen. The PPP was nice, but it didn’t cover everything, and we have a very giant place. We had to bite the proverbial bullet and do what we had to do.
As for what could have helped his industry early in the pandemic, Asaro said no one can say for sure.
“At the beginning of this pandemic, there were so many conflicting views about what actually was going to happen. Even the (Centers for Disease and Prevention) and Dr. (Anthony) Fauci (director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases), he was telling us that this was going to be no worse than the flu,” he said. “This was a total unforeseen catastrophe predicted by very few people.
“This is a crisis for the industry and others who have spent a lot of time creating a business that the government says is over,” he said.
Chef Jim Vena, executive chef at Coal House Bistro in Point Pleasant Beach, is grateful to diners who come to sit in the restaurant tent and tables topped with an umbrella. Dinner in tents has “one thing,” he said, “with particular booking requests for a “shop table.”
But he hopes to eat back indoors until the end of summer, “or at the best time, in September.”
“Tables and tents make up only a percentage of the occupancy of the internal dining room,” Vena said. “For months, we’ve been paying rent without being able to use the internal seats at all. Renting an industrial grade tent installed through professionals in addition to contracting increases our constant expenses. Then, you want more staff to kindly attend tables and additional staff to pleasantly package the pickup and delivery food, as well as very expensive packaging and bags, gloves, masks and specialized cleaning and disinfection products, all expanding our variable expenses.
“It’s very confusing and requires day-to-day control attention as new restrictions change,” he said, “and it’s our priority that the protection of visitors and equipment is monitored and respected.
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George Kyrtatas, executive chef and co-owner of the SweetWater Bar and Grill in Cinnaminson, said if he could serve consumers in a compromised outdoor space, it’s still a fraction of what they were doing before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It’s been extremely difficult, especially for the restaurant industry,” he said. “Different things that we’re trying to do and come up with, I would not use the word guidance for the government, I would use the words lack of guidance, because they’re saying statements such as outdoor dining is allowed and then you have certain restaurants that have outdoor dining spaces and then the health department closes them down because they have a fixed roof for example.
And then, after the fitness branch closed them, three days later, the governor replaced the drafting of his decree saying that constant ceilings are allowed as long as 50% of the walls are open. This is complicated because there is no superior address.
In the past, Hathaway’s dining-style dining place was pierced by its circle of relatives in the front domain of the site, but is now a banqueting space. Kyrtatas said his circle of relatives had owned a place to eat there for about 36 years.
When asked if he expected things to happen in the fall and winter once things calmed down more with the pandemic, Kyrtatas wasn’t sure.
Like Kyrtatas, those involved in the states art, music and theater scenes are not sure what the next six months will bring. One thing seems clear: indoor concerts, dance or theater performances seem unlikely before 2021.
“First of all, everyone wants cash to get there,” Roncace of Bergen PAC said. “If possible, it would be for government aid agencies to take a look at the sector, rather than pursue it on a giant scale with monetary aid. Analyze these sectors, perceive their activities and create anything to help them.”
Curless indicated that Haddon Township’s Ritz had so far earned approximately $200,000, basically in loans, which is enough to continue paying the mortgage, electric power bill and some loans accumulated at this time. The theater will seek more recently announced pandemic relief grants across the county, Curless said, and at least one member has mobilized to stick to social media and the network’s commitment.
Lobbying teams such as the National Association of Indefinite Places have suggested to Congress investing in indefinite sites in a new stimulus bill. The agreement states that the sites will likely lose $8.9 billion if the scenes remain dark until the end of 2020.
American for the Arts estimates that the state’s nonprofit and nonprofit arts sector contributes about $23 billion a year to the New Jersey economy, representing about 4% of gross domestic product.
“We’re hoping that in this upcoming stimulus package that folks are aware of the number of jobs and folks that are still going to be out of work for the next few months,” said John McEwen, of the Morristown-based New Jersey Theater Alliance. “I don’t think people realize the impact of the shutdown. Stagehands, actors, musicians, management staff, a lot of people that the theaters employ. All of these people are out of work.”
McEwen, whose organization includes 31 professional theaters in New Jersey, said theaters sought to stay in touch with their audience and earn money by presenting exhibits and generating virtual summer theater camps.
In June, the UK unveiled a program for the country’s arts industry for approximately $2 billion, adding about $1 billion in grants for concert halls, theatres, galleries and independent cinemas.
McEwen and other artistic leaders would like the federal government to do something for the arts organizations in this country.
Frankel of Crossroads agreed that more is desired to help the music industry survive. He said banks were paying giant rates on loans under the pay-as-you-go program and were willing to lend more and qualify less for establishments looking to stay afloat.
“There are still a lot of paintings to be made or the whole industry will collapse,” Frankel said. “… We want someone to oversee the industry. We will keep you closed for six months, but without interruption of insurance and you will have to continue to repay your loan and continue to pay for utilities.”
While its halls are closed, Bergen PAC and the Basie Center are among the venues that generate open-air concerts behind the wheel; The Basie Center also partnered with Allenhurst promoter Tony Pallagrosi’s UMT Presents concert production company to inaugurate “Supper Club Concerts Under the Stars”, a series of outdoor concerts located behind the Blu Grotto restaurant in Monmouth Park.
“I think it’s up to everyone in the outdoor thinking music industry,” said Pallagrosi, who had to postpone several exhibits he planned to perform in indoor theaters.
Dermer of Asbury Audio said it expects many corporations operating in the music industry production segment not to suffer pandemic closure.
Even once the venues have the green light to re-host concerts, it will take a few months for the gangs to get back on the road, he said. Meanwhile, only traders are out of work, but their friends from the music industry are missing, he said.
“For most of us who work full-time in this company, whether regionally or nationally, their social life is their job,” Dermer said. “It’s not just the paintings that have been closed, it’s your social life.”
Jean Mikle covers Toms River and several other Ocean County towns, and has been writing about local government and politics at the Jersey Shore for nearly 35 years. A finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in public service, she’s also passionate about the Shore’s storied music scene. Contact her: @jeanmikle, 732-643-4050, [email protected].
Staff writers Alex Biese, Tammy Paolino and Celeste E. Whittaker contributed to this story.
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