Corona pandemic: New York is desperately looking for normalcy

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The world-famous metropolis is sliding deeper and deeper into the corona crisis. The rich are leaving the city en masse. The situation is becoming increasingly devastating for the poor.

Capri Djiatiasmoro slowly feels its way forward, first letting the surf wash around your ankles, then your calves, before reaching into the waves and splattering your upper body with both hands. The Atlantic is still cold, it is just 11 degrees Celsius. But that is not the only reason why Capri only carefully ventured into the water last weekend, when the bathing season officially begins in New York in other years. She looks around twice to see if there really isn’t any on the beach on New York’s Coney Island peninsula, which is world-famous for its amusement park
police you can see. Because she pays attention to compliance with the Corona rules of conduct, and sometimes rigorously. Capri is now completely in the water.

The last weekend in May when the
USA the fallen is commemorated and that culminates in Memorial Day this Monday – it is usually a weekend that is used for excursions, for cultural events. It marks the start of summer. Tens of thousands of people squeeze into the subway, grab hot dogs at Famous Nathan’s on Surf Avenue, throw their clothes and the severity of winter on the sand, and enjoy being outside. This year, however, there is an oppressive atmosphere on Memorial Day Weekend on Coney Island beach, which is also known as ordinary people’s heaven.

Symbol of the crisis: the empty beaches and the amusement park of Coney Island

Mayor Bill de Blasio said you can go for a walk if you follow the distance rules, but sports and swimming are strictly prohibited. Anyone who dares to do so will be pulled out of the water. Experienced swimmers like Capri, who swim up and down for miles here every morning, let it depend.

The Coney Island scene is indicative of the mood in New York these days. It is almost symbolic that the party for the 100th anniversary of the Coney Island Ferris Wheel is canceled. Like the amusement park season opening. The 45 meter high “Wonder Wheel” stands still. No wonder.

New York has the corona crisis under control. The curve of new infections and deaths has flattened out and the hospitals have sufficient capacity. Test centers have opened all over the city, where people can be tested for antibodies and the virus in an uncomplicated manner free of charge. But there are still 1,000 new infections every day and more than 100 people die from the consequences of the novel lung disease Covid-19. Out of seven criteria for the gradual reopening of businesses and public institutions in New York State, the city only fulfills four. A return to normal seems a long way off.

After seven weeks in the confines of their often tiny apartments, New Yorkers feel their way into the open air and carefully try out what life in public can be like under pandemic conditions. Like Capri with water, they wet themselves a little with freedom – very few dare to take a full bath in the crowd.

The past few weeks have also been too gloomy to be impartial. More than 20,000 New Yorkers are on
Corona died – almost seven times as many as in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The pictures of the refrigerated wagons for the corpses in front of hospitals are still fresh in people’s minds. Many know someone who has become seriously ill. Between 100 and 400 people died in each of the 67 districts, which are divided according to postcodes. Impromptu memorials with candles and flowers appear daily on the sidewalks of the hardest-hit Harlem and Bronx neighborhoods.

Corona crisis in New York: there is an oppressive atmosphere in the city

The oppressive atmosphere in the city is due to the fact that familiar problems are also reappearing. While the police were handing out masks in parks in the better areas, people in the poorer areas were brutally separated from one another. Several videos circulated on social media of black men being brutally beaten to the ground by police officers. Police statistics confirmed the impression one had to get from such videos. The vast majority of New Yorkers arrested for violating Corona orders were black and Latino populations. The New York police were faced – once again – with accusations of racism. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio apologized and announced that the police were no longer responsible for enforcing the orders. The situation threatens to damage the fragile trust between blacks and Latinos and the police.

Compliance with the protective measures was delegated to neighborhood organizations. But the withdrawal of the police only makes the uncertainty worse. At the moment, many New Yorkers don’t know exactly how to behave.

Your uncertainty extends far beyond the current situation. You wonder what will become of New York. What is emerging has a depressing effect on many. It is depressing, for example, that a veritable mass exodus began among the wealthier residents. It is estimated that around half a million New Yorkers have long left the city. More posh residential areas such as Greenwich Village, Park Slope, the Upper East Side or the Upper West Side are swept empty. It is said that up to 50 percent of the residents have left these quarters.

The central business district of Manhattan, the densely packed skyscrapers of Midtown and the Wall Street district, whose silhouette is New York’s trademark, also remain empty. Most companies, from financial institutions to technology companies, have settled into digital home work while also slimming down. It is unlikely that they will send hundreds of thousands of employees to their office towers again anytime soon. The bloated market for office space in Manhattan threatens to implode. With far-reaching consequences. Areas like the recently opened futuristic skyscraper oasis Hudson Yards could become ghost neighborhoods. Especially since the industries that depend on office workers are also threatened by the consequences of the pandemic. When and if Midtown Manhattan will come to life is in the stars. Restaurants, shops and department stores: empty. Shop window: boarded up. Winter fashion is still on display.

Long queues form in front of a New York soup kitchen

In the meantime, the majority of those who do not have a weekend home on Long Island or in the Hudson Valley have remained in the metropolis. For them, life in New York is getting more difficult. At the beginning of last week, two million New Yorkers had applied for unemployment benefits – a quarter of the total population. And economists assume that the economic crisis has not yet reached a number of industries. How dramatic the situation is could recently be seen in front of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, the ultra-modern high-gloss arena of the Brooklyn Nets basketball club. The Nets set up a soup kitchen here to show solidarity. Long queues formed at seven in the morning.

Poverty is also evident elsewhere: in front of abandoned shops and in doorways, more and more camps and tents of homeless people are appearing. Many of them are fleeing the tightly packed emergency shelters out of fear of the corona virus. The city has other priorities than driving them out. Actually. But the problem got too big: Because so many homeless people were sleeping in subway cars, Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York State, unceremoniously shut down the subway network, which has been running around the clock for decades. For cleaning work. The homeless are now thrown out at one o’clock in the morning at the terminus. The luckier ones end up on the beach. Others wander around in neighborhoods they don’t know.

New York is a harrowing picture. As tax revenues dwindle and the need for social benefits grows, some experts predict the city will go bankrupt this year. The New York that existed a few weeks ago is unlikely to come back anytime soon – that shiny, rich New York that emerged from the last crisis, the financial crash of 2008. “New York will be poorer,” writes columnist Molly Jong-Fast in the magazine The Atlantic. “This federal government is unlikely to save the Wuhan of America, and we will have to cope with budget cuts that we have not seen in decades.” Incidentally, it does not find this a problem. “New York will not die, only present-day New York will die. And the New York of the present always dies. ”Sally Randall Brunger, who was born in the city and has experienced several reincarnations from New York in the past 50 years, agrees. “Then more young, creative people come back and do interesting things,” she says. “And in 20 years we will have a new New York.”

One columnist writes: “The New York of today will die.”

Brunger was part of the subculture in wild New York in the 80s. She experienced the legendary downtown club scene, and among her friends was artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring. She has also reinvented herself several times, today she works as a flight attendant. She is not afraid of having to start all over in a “new New York”. “I attended the Manhattan University of Life,” she says. And when you graduate there you are ready for anything. Even for a pandemic.

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