“New York is dead”: art campaign against faithless New Yorkers who fled to Florida during the pandemic
Bild: Dada Shikako
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The pandemic has hit the metropolis hard. As a result, rents and purchase prices are falling. Can the city that never sleeps recover from this crisis at all?
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Et was a sunny January day on South Beach in Miami, when a mysterious message suddenly appeared in the sky: “New York is dead. Don’t come back!” It said on a banner that was pulled behind an airplane. It was meant sarcastically and also a little maliciously, as a swipe at people who turned their backs on New York in the midst of the Corona crisis, for example with Miami as a target. At the same time, it should be a bow to New Yorkers who stayed. In Los Angeles there was a billboard with the same inscription in a prominent place. The New York artist association “The Locker Room” was behind the action. Its founder Samara Bliss says that she did not want to criticize anyone who had to leave the city, for example to move back in with their parents for financial reasons. Rather, it should appeal to those who have left New York in the lurch. But Bliss also thinks that the city could do without such faithless residents, because the opposite of the banner is true: “New York is not dead at all.”
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The city was hit hard by the pandemic. It has been almost exactly a year since the American metropolis, which is usually said to never sleep, came to a sudden standstill. The lockdown captured a lot of what New York is, be it restaurants or Broadway theaters. An eerie silence returned to the otherwise hectic Times Square. The city became an early epicenter of the Corona crisis and the scene of harrowing images of makeshift hospitals or refrigerated trucks in front of hospitals where corpses were being shipped. To date, nearly 30,000 New Yorkers have died after being infected with the virus.
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