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How Do You Virus-Proof a Business That Depends on Dancing?

How Do You Virus-Proof a Business That Depends on Dancing?

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The One Year, One Neighborhood series follows small businesses in the Pike/Pine corridor in Seattle, the first coronavirus hot spot in the U.S., to get a sense of what cities will look like as they reopen.

Hallie Kuperman is a dance instructor and owns the Century Ballroom, as well as an adjoining restaurant called the Tin Table. It was hard for her to keep up with rising rents in the neighborhood where she’s been operating for more than two decades even before Governor Jay Inslee ordered Washington state residents to stay home near the end of March. Now there’s no money coming in and the bills are piling up. “I have thousands of square feet that are unusable right now for what we do,” she says. “Social dancing is about touching other people. … As a business, I really have no idea what will happen.”

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