New York longs for summer

New York is well on the way to making up for its forced Corona break with a historic 2021. The “summer of freedom” has long been compared to that of love in 1967. But there is a problem.

The waitress in the cellar of Marie’s Crisis swings on the red wooden paneling in front of the piano and lasciviously stretches her legs. The crowded audience in the legendary piano bar in the West Village cheers, a woman turns to her companion and says: “New York is back, baby”.

Thirty minutes away, on the other side of the East River, night is well advanced in the Brooklyn industrial park, but the batteries for the DJ speakers are holding up. Three dozen people dance on the street through the thumping techno basses. A young guy stands still and looks at the scene almost in disbelief, but with a big grin.

Another asks him what he has taken, it is impossible to look so happy without drugs. But euphoria is appropriate in every state of mind in the hot New York summer 2021. The last Corona restrictions have fallen, unbridled months seem to have dawned in the cosmopolitan city, which have long been compared to the summer of love in 1967.

A city is partying

At the moment, the picture is the same everywhere in the eight million metropolis. Whether at the Pride parties in the fountains of Manhattan, bathing at sunset in the East River, street barbecues in Harlem, block parties with dances on car roofs in Queens, the full city parks or between the Atlantic Ocean and roller coasters on Coney Island Beach: New Yorks Days are hotter and the nights louder, more colorful and longer than the celebrants here can remember.

But the joy that seemed limitless a few days ago is clouded – because the Delta variant is also on the advance in North America.

Looking back at one of the darkest hours in town. The images that will go around the world in spring 2020 have burned into my memory: the deserted Times Square. Hundreds of refrigerated trucks hauling thousands of corpses away from overcrowded hospitals. The subsequent burying of the bodies in mass graves on an island off the Bronx.

2020 – like September 11, 2001

The Navy hospital ship Comfort anchored in the Hudson off Manhattan, ready to take pressure off the clinics in the event of an impending disaster. It never came to extremes: With more than 18,000 simultaneous patients in hospitals across the state, the peak was reached and the ventilators were sufficient. Even so, hundreds died every day for weeks. Many in town know someone who succumbed to the plague.

You mention 2020 again and again in the same line as September 11, 2001. In July 2021 the world will look different again. The aftermath of the crisis, economic repercussions and a sharp increase in violent crime will not go away anytime soon. But the spirit of optimism outshone the city in recent weeks like the fireworks on Independence Day the skyline.

Luck flowed through Guillermo Valencia too when he recently celebrated the night on a Pride party boat. The ship drove along the Hudson River and finally passed the Statue of Liberty, in front of the 36-year-old graphic designer from Colombia dozens danced exuberantly and shirtless to disco music. “That was freedom,” enthuses Valencia, who traveled to the city for the Pride celebrations. “It was perfect”.

Queasy re-entry

But with the party mood for some, in addition to disbelief, there is also a slight overload. Jaysen Henderson is at the Nowadays club in the Ridgewood neighborhood of Queens. Hundreds of people crowd around him as if nothing had happened, but the 27-year-old feels a bit uncomfortable. He had left town for a month and the clubs were still closed.

Now he’s back on the first day – and New York hits him with full force: “That just overwhelms me a little,” says Henderson and will soon be leaving the “Nowadays”. The fear of contact with the new freedom will disappear, Henderson is certain of that. What remains for many New Yorkers, however, is a certain concern that normality is deceptive after all.

That the summer of freedom becomes an island of freedom. Because not only in New York is the proportion of the delta variant of the coronavirus increasing rapidly. In the United States, it is estimated that it now accounts for half of all infections. The number of infections is still at a rather low level, but the curve is pointing upwards.

Lots of skepticism in Brooklyn and the Bronx

Mark Levine, chairman of the New York City Council health committee, is concerned: “We have to take this seriously. If you are not vaccinated, vaccination time is NOW, ”he recently wrote on Twitter.