New York is famous for a lot, but not for empty avenues and squares and failed Broadway shows. What does the Corona crisis do to the dazzling US metropolis – and the people who live in it? A bike tour through the city that suddenly sleeps.
These days you take the bike to Manhattan. The subway is still running, but the risk is too high. Dozens of New York public transportation employees have already died. So the way leads over the Queensboro Bridge to Midtown.
The famous Met-Life building rises above Park Avenue, in front of which all traffic lights are red for hundreds of meters – you can actually ignore them, there aren’t many cars left anyway.
New York. A place of longing and a symbol for so much, but certainly not for the mood of a small German town on public holidays. In the vicinity of the deserted Times Square, the wildly flickering neon advertising cannot dispel the oppressive feeling in the stomach. One asks oneself: “When will it be over?”. And: “Will New York be New York?”
“Thank you to those who fight for our lives”, is written on one of the oversized billboards that still light up Times Square as bright as day at night. Respect for the doctors, nurses and orderlies who have to declare hundreds dead every day.
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the shocking figures in the morning press conferences with a firm voice. Lots of New Yorkers watch them on TV looking for something to hold on to. “He’s one of the few people I trust that if we follow the measures everything will be fine,” says architect Catherine Wilmes, who looks out of her home office in Brooklyn. The hipster hotspot Williamsburg in Brooklyn is also dead at the moment.
Cuomo keeps comparing the number of victims with the darkest day in recent New York history. “New York State lost 2,753 people at the World Trade Center on September 11,” reads a screen. Including the number of victims of the current catastrophe: so far more than 10,000. A new, shocking record has just been set across the US: almost 2,500 dead in just one day.
But the comparison with the terrorist attacks and the US war rhetoric do not seem to fit the mood in New York. On September 11, 2001, jihadists brought terror to the streets of the center of the free world with a tremendous blow. Where today the cyclist rolls past a memorial place rather lonely. In spring 2020, however, the virus ate its way unnoticed through densely populated New York. Don’t panic, no screams, no rubble.
The dramas of the pandemic take place behind the facades of the clinics. It’s a largely silent crisis that is keeping New York in suspense these days. Presumably it is therefore images like those of refrigerated trucks lined up to remove the corpses or the mass graves on Hart Island off the Bronx that send shock waves into the world. For a moment they make the extent of what has just gotten tangible.
Catharina Nickel is one of more than eight million people in the city whose lives have changed almost overnight. The German actually lives in Brooklyn, but moved in with a friend in Harlem before the curfew began. Here, in the economically weaker north of Manhattan, it is also evident how differently the social classes deal with the virus.
“Here you get the feeling that a lot of people have a refusal attitude,” says the 34-year-old UN employee. People still stand together in groups and without a face mask. In contrast, the wealthy, for example from the Upper East Side, have long since moved to their summer homes on Long Island.
The emptier streets in Harlem have also changed Nickel’s sense of security. She no longer wanted to be outside in the dark, although New York never seemed dangerous to her. “I think that has now changed a bit.” She had thought about flying to Cologne in the meantime, but with all the travel restrictions that makes no sense. As a German abroad, these days you really notice for the first time how far you are from home.
More than three weeks after the “break” began, the numbers of newly infected people in New York are slowly stabilizing. Yet another facet of the crisis weighs heavier every day. Hundreds of thousands can no longer pay the astronomical rents without work, because the budget of New Yorkers is traditionally sewn to the edge. Tens of thousands of shops and restaurants are also struggling to survive. The tour leads past windows boarded up again and again.
“Business? What business are you talking about? ”Asks the employee in a laundromat when the full laundry bag is placed on the scales. More than ten kilos, after all, you shouldn’t go to stores as often as possible – even if, like so many New Yorkers, you don’t have a washing machine. The woman behind the counter says in a surprisingly good mood that this is also noticeable in the hygiene of her customers. They shouldn’t just always wash their hands: “Hands and ass, they belong together!” She shouts and laughs dirty.
The economy has to get going again – even if only gradually – in this deeply divided America everyone agrees for once. But can New York be the way it once was again? “No,” fear pessimists. “No, it will be much better,” say the optimists. After all, the proud city has always emerged strengthened from crises, whether from the great depression of the late 1920s or September 11th.
There is enough hope along the way. Not only when you can see the Empire State Building from almost everywhere, which – illuminated like a beating heart – keeps the pulse of the metropolis up. But also when the daily applause for the workers in the city dies down after 7 pm, Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell steps up to his window on the Upper West Side to shout “The Impossible Dream” by Andy Williams.
Mitchell also had Covid-19, but he got well again. Catharina Nickel also believes that the city will get back on its feet: “New York and the New York soul will recover from this, I’m pretty sure.”
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