THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 15
gates the amount of time you have to
stay closed.”) One new approach involved
pleas for peace painted directly onto the
plywood. In SoHo, someone had scrawled
a quote from the Dalai Lama on the
Jimmy Choo boutique. A Ralph Lauren
store nearby had one from Ronald Rea-
gan. A saboteur, perhaps? (“Borderline
insurance fraud,” someone called it.)
“What the stores have learned never to
do is to put up merchandising and brand-
specific information like, ‘Hey! Two-for-
one sale today!’” Buiocchi explained.
The best outcome, business-wise,
was a resounding victory for either can-
didate. “Clear, decisive, everybody go
back to work in twenty-four hours,”
Buiocchi said. By Wednesday, he was
ruling out that dream scenario. Yet for
the next two nights only small protests
materialized in the city. Calm—or ex-
haustion—mostly prevailed.
All the plywood began to imply a di-
minished faith in self-government. It
also, in a way, conveyed confidence in a
product. The boarded-up Versace storereinforced the idea that lots of people
want Versace. But there were limits. The
Sweetgreen near Union Square was
boarded up; was it worried that citizens
would make a run on Shroomami bowls?
“The reason is, sometimes people just
want to throw a garbage can through a
window, and if they damage equipment
it could be hundreds of thousands of dol-
lars,” a contractor, whose company had
shuttered a bakery last week, explained.
For those most pessimistic about the
long-term stability of the body public,
the best option was something perma-
nent but not panicky. In the weeks be-
fore the election, Riot Glass, a companyThere was a commotion near the
Chase Center, and everyone turned to
see a caravan of police S.U.V.s, Secret
Service vehicles, an ambulance, and
what looked like a modified Brink’s
truck speed by. “There he is!” Bob said,
and waved to one of the cars. “I saw
him!” Afterward, in the small—per-
haps envious?—audience by the fence,
there was some doubt about whether
Bob had actually seen Biden.
With the clocks having just been
set back, afternoon turned to night
somewhere around noon. The results
were still murky, and the crowd, such
as it was, dwindled to nothing. The
only people left were three Secret Ser-
vice agents sitting in a white tent, look-
ing at their phones. Then, just after
nine, in the darkness and under the
vast flag, an Indian-American group
of six—two friends, with their wives
and kids, all from Wilmington—ar-
rived. They took pictures of the flag,
of each other, and of the empty park-
ing lot where Biden may or may not
eventually declare himself the winner.
Approached by a reporter, they nom-
inated the second-youngest of the
group, seventeen-year-old Risha Kumar,
to be their spokesperson. (The Trump
supporter in the family, Risha’s father,
was demure.) “We’re just excited to
take photos near here, because it’s kind
of a historic event, right?” Risha said,
her eyes bright, searching for each next
word. “Honestly, there’s not really been
any big politician in history from Del-
aware, so it’s just cool to have some-
one who’s from the local political scene
on the national stage.” Being so young,
Risha’s overlooking Biden’s forty-four
years in Washington, D.C., could be
forgiven. It turned out that she knew
her history.
“I honestly think that the No. 1 issue
is how much Americans trust their
government. I think that a lot of Amer-
icans trust the democratic system, but
do we really trust the people who are
in power? And I think that without
trusting the people who are in power
at least a little bit, we can’t even com-
promise, and we’ve become so sad-
dened by the situation. And I think
that this has been a pattern. It’s kind
of just been going down in our gov-
ernment since Nixon.”
—Dave Eggers
1
DEPT.OFANTICIPATION
P LY WO O D CITY
I
t is not a promising sign for democ-
racy that New York City prepared for
a Presidential election as if it were a hur-
ricane. If the symbol of the 2000 race was
the hanging chad, and 2008’s was the
“Hope” poster, 2020’s may be the board-
ed-up storefront. Before the votes came
in, the smart money among the business
class was on destruction, whether in cel-
ebration or in protest. Or maybe both.
In Manhattan, as Tuesday approached,
entire blocks were shuttered.
This made Tom Buiocchi an impor-
tant figure. In normal times, his com-
pany, ServiceChannel, helps businesses
such as Chipotle and Tory Burch find
contractors to do work on their buildings.
“The common problem is, you know, the
toilet blew up in the bathroom of the Ba-
nana Republic in Walla Walla, Washing-
ton,” he said. Recently, however, he’s be-
come a consigliere to companies nervous
about election unrest. In the two weeks
leading up to Election Day, Service-
Channel helped put up plywood and
other looting deterrents at twelve hun-
dred buildings. Two hundred and twenty-
nine of them were in New York.
The decision to lock down can be
tricky. “Being the first to board up, or the
only one that didn’t board up, could be
perceived that you’re siding with some
particular stance,” Buiocchi said. During
the scattered looting after the murder of
George Floyd, this spring, some compa-
nies were slow to respond. At one of the
stores Buiocchi services in the Bay Area,
he said, “things were being boarded up
as the protesters were coming by. There
was literally a negotiation between the
contractors and the protesters.” Before
the election, owners exchanged tips.
Looters had started bringing drills to
unscrew the plywood, so owners learned
to use screws with unusually shaped
heads. They added corrugated metal. The
deep-pocketed switched to plywood that
was fire resistant. Strategies were devised
to prevent the spillage of blood. (“Bio-
hazard,” Buiocchi explained. “It elon-