The mayor pushed out a plan, only to have the governor override him, causing unnecessary confusion for thousands of business owners and school parents.

By Jesse McKinley, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Dana Rubinstein and Joseph Goldstein

ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had barely finished a fairly routine coronavirus briefing earlier this month when he got word that the New York City mayor, Bill de Blasio, had just blindsided him.

The mayor unexpectedly announced that he intended to close down schools and nonessential businesses in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, where the coronavirus was surging in communities with large Orthodox Jewish populations. Mr. de Blasio asserted that he had been in contact with the state, whose approval was needed.

It took less than 24 hours for Mr. Cuomo to fire back.

He halted the mayor’s plan to shutter businesses, calling it imprecise and incomplete, and sped up the closure of schools. By the next day, the governor unveiled his own plan: another phased-in lockdown, complete with color-coded maps and a barely veiled message for Mr. de Blasio.

“A law doesn’t work if you’re too incompetent or too politically frightened to enforce it,” Mr. Cuomo said last week.

The governor and mayor, both Democrats, have feuded for years, and their reluctance to work together closely has become a critical issue during the pandemic. Mr. de Blasio, who needed Mr. Cuomo’s approval to act, pushed out a plan without the state’s blessing, only to have the governor override that plan with one of his own — causing unnecessary confusion for thousands of business owners and school parents.

Restaurants and other businesses were left wondering if they were meant to be open or closed; parents wondered the same about their children’s schools. Tricolor maps set boundaries in the middle of city blocks and public parks. Some rules resembled past restrictions; others were completely new.

For observers of New York politics, the governor’s actions were no surprise. For the last seven years, Mr. Cuomo has overruled Mr. de Blasio again and again and again, seeing himself as both more capable and constitutionally correct: The city is, after all, a creation of the state, and, as Mr. Cuomo likes to remind people, the governor outranks the mayor.

But that penchant for control over city affairs may have spawned a new set of problems. Mr. Cuomo’s crackdown sparked angry protests, federal lawsuits, and accusations that the governor was castigating Orthodox Jews, whose leaders urged more sensitivity toward a community once cast by Nazis as purveyors of disease.

The protests in Brooklyn even became political fodder for President Trump, whose campaign signs were visible at some of the demonstrations. On Wednesday, the president used Twitter to suggest that the police response was emblematic of the “radical left.” Two days later, Mr. Cuomo accused the Trump campaign of instigating the protests.

To some, the visceral backlash from the Orthodox community was inevitable, especially since the restrictions coincided with the weeklong Jewish holiday of Sukkot. And should the state’s intervention help fend off a possible second wave in New York, that would outweigh any fallout.

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