Apr 9, 2020
NYC, ahead of the apex
The thing about NYC is the density. It’s the physical proximity we have to each other, and the teeming thrum of the streets. It’s the tightness of the buildings, the closeness of cars and bicycles, and the throngs of other people. It’s our bodies navigating around each other, and sometimes into each other, in restaurants, bodegas, clubs (the private, public, underground, or temporary kind), outdoor concerts, parks, galleries, stores, the subway — and sometimes just waiting at the corner. It’s the visible output of the productivity and the innovation of the city’s remaining artists and newly arrived tech folk. It’s the sheer number of languages and dress styles and cultures in neighborhoods that change character every few blocks from Inwood to Crown Heights, Hunts Point to Huguenot, Astoria to Nolita.
The city sends out a constant buzz no matter where you are, provoking and inspiring us to its particular hustle, its “steely resolve.” It’s the thing so many tourists and visitors say exhausts them — and the thing that people who live here, who drink the city’s air, crave, even as we complain about it. (And we like to complain. It’s a common pastime. It’s a form of love.)
The city has lost its hum and succumbed to increasing silence — broken only by sirens cutting through the air in short, frequent spurts over the past few weeks — as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps through it and flays it raw.
Millions of people — committed New Yorkers, or those who have nowhere else to go — are heeding the call to stay at home. We are locked down in small apartments for over three weeks and counting. Some of us are alone (never before has remaining in place and keeping still been at the core of community care and civic responsibility), while some of us continue taking care of our children, our elders, and the newly sick under increasingly stressful circumstances.
Most of us who choose to live in this city are designed to be out in the world, bumping up against each other and indulging in the “you never know” of it all — you never who you might meet, you never know what you might see — that this city offers up. But now, you never really know who might catch or transmit the virus. (And we don’t quite know why we are so much worse off here. We are the epicenter of the epicenter. It’s the density that allowed for such wide and rapid spread — or at least that’s what they tell us, because then again, the world’s biggest cities are also the safest places in the world, and why didn’t we socially distance sooner? It was a choice to keep the country open or to not prepare for spread.)
While millions of people stay at home in a city known for movement, there are those who can’t — those who are doing the essential work of health care provision in hospitals, or those maintaining our daily needs, like groceries or internet access. People with no other choice, many from immigrant and lower-resourced neighborhoods, pile onto the subway in now unacceptable and avoidable density, taking their lives into their hands, and keep the city flowing. We thank all these workers every evening at 7pm — at a time when we’d more often than not be exiting our homes and workplaces for a drink or a show or one of those myriad networking events. All across the city, we cheer and clap, and it’s the only other sound that cuts through the quiet, the only evidence of the millions of us who all occupy the boroughs.
The clapping is beautiful— a reminder the world is rethinking who fills “essential” roles and what it takes to make society better for all of us. (Wouldn’t it be nice if we forever stopped people like teachers and doctors and grocery stockers and said “Thank you for your service”?) And what else can those of us cocooning in our homes do except cheer? — that is, except, of course: fight to vote, organize, advocate vociferously for better incomes, better protections, better lives, and commit to reimagining a better collective future once we start to rebuild.
Even so, I wonder if it would feel silly to say “thank you for your service” to the people I come across in my daily life, in my neighborhood. The people who make the neighborhood what it is: The multi-generational Sicilian family who runs the entire block from the corner deli to the wine store and whose patriarch taught me my first Sicilian words.The Egyptian brothers who run the smaller corner deli and who let their school age boys run diagonally across the intersection at the red light, giggling all the way. The manicurists from Ecuador who travel by subway into Manhattan from Queens every day and back again, late every night. The women from eastern India and Bangladesh who run the threading salon and gossip in hushed tones— I still don’t know if they know I understand them. The stoic Sikh uncleji-type man who never says anything to you when you shop at his market, but every once in a while will slip a little gift of sweets your way.
I wonder when next I’ll see any of them — or even if they will be in their storefronts when we start to reemerge from this lockdown. The world over, in every city like New York, we have no way of knowing which businesses will survive the ripple effects of this pandemic, which cultural institutions will be forced to fold, or what our streetscapes will look like.
And while some of us housebound people organize closets and meditate, or struggle to homeschool children, or write think pieces, tweet in solidarity and bewilderment, and attend planning video calls to make sense of this all and to start planning for “after,” we all also wait, suspended, as the city falls deeper into silence and deeper into grief. The silence feels unnatural. But it is also necessary, simply to have space to experience the enormity of what is happening: By Wednesday, April 8, the pandemic’s official death toll surpassed 4,500 — a number higher than 9/11.
Four thousand, five hundred. The number is hard to take in, and yet it may be more. As I write this, the United States has the greatest official number of covid19-related deaths worldwide, and New York City has the greatest number in the country. In the face of this, the federal government has been less than supportive, even seemingly vindictive towards the city. Trump is taking some kind of revenge on the city of his birth — or maybe against Governor Cuomo, that other son of Queens. Regardless of the reasons — that’s for another day, another topic — NYC is aching. Four thousand, five hundred people — health care workers, teachers, public transportation workers, and so many more integral to the heartbeat of the city — lost in fewer than four weeks, dying at overloaded hospitals where frontline health workers battle to keep people alive, working in hallways in front of makeshift morgue tents and refrigerated trucks, while officials tell us the possible apex of the crisis is still in a few days to come and speculate about building mass graves in our city parks.
Every death matters. Every death diminishes us. Every job lost and every person forced to move away weakens the city. The thing about New York City is the interweaving of all our experiences. In the worst ways, labor is invisible to those willful enough to look away. In the best ways, we always have each other’s backs, even as we bristle at each other, and at our core, we know we are all interconnected and interdependent.
We always have been — but we understood this especially in the aftermath of 9/11, the memory of which persistently bears on this crisis. Someone said to me a few days ago that what will spring from this pandemic will be a mix of 9/11 and the crash of ’08. That assessment resonates. But the city — indeed, the world — should brace itself for much more.
We lost opportunities for progress after 9/11 and 2008. As a country, when we had the opportunity to expand and connect into international networks of solidarity and shared prosperity and cooperation, we instead invested in aggression and isolation, doubling down on imperialist violence against people of color here and around the world. We tolerated and now have begun to participate in the global experiment of populism, fascism, and hard-right nationalism. As a city, New York ushered in a monoculture driven by the finance sector, replacing small boutiques, artists’ studios, and mom-and-pop shops with big banks and drugstore chains, remaking the nature of the city and betraying its foundations of creativity and discovery.
The number of lives lost, livelihoods shattered, and disenfranchised and displaced people from this pandemic and its attendant global recession is likely to eclipse 9/11 and 2008 combined. As we think of the massive shifts coming to the global economy, and as we start to contemplate the global and intersecting effects of climate change, mass inequality, forced displacement, gender based violence, and, yes, the next pandemic, the future is darkly uncertain.
But we do have a chance, and there are yet glimmers of hope, in the growing acknowledgement this pandemic has brought out that we are indeed all interconnected. We’re going to need each other across cities, across regions, across sectors, to respond to this pandemic, now and as it evolves, just as we’ve sorely needed each other to respond to all the other issues affecting us all. Hyperlocality is key, but so is global connection through lessons learned, resources distributed, and shared expressions of joy and pain. Isolationism won’t serve us. We’ll need each other in our local communities and across the world, just as we did after 9/11 and just as we failed to recognize after 2008 (or the annum horribilis that was 2016)— and exponentially more so.
Those events, those catastrophes, put people together in physical spaces. Across the world, we joined in hugs and raised glasses of wine and held planning meetings in apartments and cafes. Alongside other sister urban centers that exercise a gravitational pull on the world — Kampala to Mumbai, CDMX to Cape Town, Buenos Aires to Milan, Berlin to Istanbul — we bumped up against each other and learned and experienced together, in community. Collective action requires that we move together as a body — we need to get outside our own four walls and out into the world — but we don’t have that possibility right now. For the moment we will have to get creative on our Zoom parties and WhatsApp calls and virtual chats.
While the thing about NYC is the density, we can only hope we can get back to that in person someday soon. But when we start to reimagine and rebuild together, as we hopefully reinvest in creativity and discovery, avenues for shared prosperity and justice, and a set of new deals for people and planet, we will need to connect, in real life and virtually, across boundaries, bringing in the artists and creatives and the tech folks, the health care workers and the shop owners, the teachers and government officials — everyone that animates life in any city. We’ll need to remember we are all “essential.” We will get there. For now, we mourn and heal.
