Dhe hospital tents in Central Park are being dismantled, the hospital ship has left port, the number of infections is falling, and fewer are dying every day. New York, the center of the corona epidemic worldwide, has the worst behind it, it has been said for a few days. For now.
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The world could have guessed the worst by the numbers of dead and the pictures of hearses parked on the side of the road. But what was it like when the worst wasn’t? Where there was only emptiness, emptiness in a city where previously there was hardly any space for cars, bicycles, scooters, prams, pedestrians, which led to constant congestion on streets, in subways, on sidewalks? To engine noise that was almost unbearable, to horn that never broke off and was never of any use, to frustration, ranting, jostling? It was always like that – and suddenly no more when, from the middle of March, nothing more could be heard except the sirens of the ambulances. Far beyond the city, in other places of silence, this was noted with horror, as was the emptiness of the avenues and the otherwise always overcrowded squares.
The dust that collects in the apartments has always been black. Now it went gray and finally white. On the fourteenth floor, a friend could still hear the birds chirping as they hopped around in the grassy strip of Broadway. The city amazes her again and again, she says. She has lived in New York for sixty years, and she knows that it is not always catastrophes in which an unknown face of the city shows itself, but also. This is how new stories are always generated. Every New Yorker knows only a part of all who let themselves be told, which is why his city is the only one that has made it into its own encyclopedia, with entries by specialists for the sharpest contradictions, the most playful ideas, the cruelest crimes and much more more. New Yorkers are used to the fact that their city is constantly changing and yet remains unmistakable. But you cannot always be sure at what point of movement between becoming and passing you are.
Where has life withdrawn to?
So now for weeks of silence and emptiness. But they did not mean that there was no more life in the disaster and beyond the hospitals. But where had it withdrawn to? What happened at the moment of the standstill? The magazine “The New Yorker” tells about this in its current issue (and online with multimedia). On a day that later turned out to be one of the highlights of the infection process, nearly fifty reporters, authors and photographers set out to document what happened in the five districts of New York on April 15 between midnight and late the next evening. It was a collective effort, something very unusual for the magazine, which demands, values and protects the individuality of the different voices that it allows to have their say. In the case of the May 4th issue, that was expressly not the issue. The inventory begins at John F. Kennedy Airport with the arrival of a plane from Atlanta. Apparently, it’s not the only flight that still reaches New York. A cancer patient gets out and returns home to Little Italy in the Bronx after a long series of treatments in Seattle. Three military nurses on their way to the Hudson’s floating warship hospital wait for their bags. At the other end of town, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, a former clerk at a party supplies store is constantly clicking between a movie stream and her bank balance. At around 1:30 am, she expects the payment from the emergency aid program, as does a group of others who are watching their bank accounts and discussing them. The polyphonic “Reddit” conversation could be the opening or closing sequence of a film that is still too early to determine whether it will be a comedy, a social drama or a Netflix series.
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