After 423 days in the shutdown, New York opens almost all areas again. That leads to strange scenes – and new privileges for the vaccinated. A role model for Germany?
That week I wanted to witness a resurrection. The patient New York City, struck down by Corona a good year ago, has not been able to shake off a diagnosis since then: Whoever felt called upon, promised to die soon.
Manhattan is too narrow, too expensive, too oppressive, too old-fashioned, too ailing. So it could be read anywhere for a few months. This week the city wanted to prove the contrary.
On Wednesday, after 423 days of shutdown, it was reopened: the interiors of the restaurants, the sports studios, and the long-abandoned subway rattles through the night again. At the same time, after the surprising command from the US health authorities, the general mask requirement also fell.
These are strange days in Manhattan, marked by caution, courage and arrogance. They are full of contradictions. In the Metropolitan Museum, for example, it is almost shockingly full and it is difficult to keep a distance. But up there in the fresh air of the roof terrace, great care is taken to ensure that nobody’s mask slips.
Manhattan is buzzing again. The cautious are still many – a majority on the street still wears masks – but the scene is shaped by those hungry for adventure. The restaurants and the rooftop bars are full, the hotels are following suit. Some who bought houses in the country a year ago want to go back.
The pleasure in the city, which has long been written off, rules. We are experiencing the great comeback of New York City these days. Is the pandemic being prematurely declared defeated or is that the general return of the big cities in year one after Corona?
You can easily be dazzled by the glaring images of the reopening. At the very least, they cover up fresh wounds and a few well-known problems. Let’s roam new old New York
The old magic hasn’t faded. Let’s take Madison Square Park, right in the middle, but just far enough away from the tourist bustle of Midtown that it seems relaxed. You have to bury yourself very deeply in your cell phone so that your eyes don’t fall on one of the surrounding landmarks: Here the Flatiron Building, just a little scaffolded, on the other side the Empire State and in the east the almost forgotten Met Life Tower, at least once The tallest building in the world for four years, plus two new glass towers. A timeless pleasure. The benches and tables in the park are full every evening, a few older people are doing tai chi, and the Shake Shack burger joint, rarely enough in America, also has beer in plastic cups.
If you can prove that you have been completely vaccinated, you get free fries with your burger: Vaccination fries, which of course I use immediately. The old shine, with a little pandemic update.
In Grand Central, this cathedral of a train station, it shines as always, and there are now vaccinations for spontaneous people, sweetened by free tickets for the subway and regional transport. Even if the interest is weak: If the herd immunity is to work out somehow, you just have to go where the people are. Here New York shows the possible future of our cities.
Is all of New York humming? No, Midtown Manhattan of all places is still fallow. At least compared to the Midtown of the past. The unfamiliar vacancy begins just a block and a half from the Empire State Building, too few tourists. Broadway doesn’t start again until September.
The enormous vacancy rate in the offices is barely visible. The lawyers, advertisers, financial jugglers are still gone. Just a fifth of the space is occupied again. Those who could went to the home office in the Hamptons, the Hudson Valley or even Florida. The rich are gone, as are their income taxes. What remains is a crater in New York’s household.
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In Central Park, the picture-perfect New York awaits at first sight. On East Meadow, girls play lacrosse and softball, boys play football and soccer. The grass grows up on the edge and is flat in the middle. “You can still see exactly where they were,” says the nurse Tamara, who is on her lunch break here. “They” – these were the hospital tents that were supposed to relieve the Mount Sinai Hospital across the street in April and May of last year.
For me, this was one of those unforgettable Corona pictures: the US Navy hospital ship in front of Lady Liberty, the refrigerated trucks full of corpses in front of Elmhurst Hospital in Queens and the hospital tents in Central Park. Now life is raging there. But it just hasn’t overgrown grass yet.
The field hospital in Central Park (April 2020). (Source: Jeenah Moon / Reuters)
If you ride your rental bike from there one hundred and twenty blocks and over what feels like two hundred and forty potholes to the south, you end up in the future of New York. At least that’s what Gernot Wagner tells you, who lives and works there and is convinced that he has found the solution to the city’s problems on his own doorstep.
Wagner welcomes you to the “Vanilla Coffee Protein Smoothie” at the café around the corner, then we walk through his neighborhood. It takes him ninety seconds to his office at NYU, sixty seconds to the boxing studio where he trains in the morning. Wagner is a climate economist and is convinced that the earth can only be saved if more people live in cities. (He just has a book on that topic “City, Country, Climate” released.)
What can New York learn from Corona for the future? “What we’re doing here on the street,” he says, like a shot from a pistol. Wagner speaks in a singsong that draws on his homeland in Lower Austria and the long time spent on the US east coast. His look reveals that he is convinced of what he is telling.
Wagner lives in the chic Bleecker Street, with his wife and children on 70 square meters. Location instead of air. Together with other residents, he managed to close the road to car traffic in the evening. We walk through the block where a gallery and boxing center, an abortion clinic and a Catholic cultural center are neighbors and someone else has put a help-yourself refrigerator for vegetables on the sidewalk. Plus an Italian, a bar. “That’s ideal city life,” he says, all in one place. Work, living, pleasure.
He wants all of New York to be like his neighborhood in NoHo. That Midtown is on the ground is actually fine with him. These commuter work areas should be abolished, he says. Many of the empty offices in the center would have to be converted into apartments. You just have to live where you work and most of the city’s problems will be solved, says Wagner.
But there is still a long way to go. Lately he has noticed that more and more fat SUVs from New Jersey are clogging the streets in his neighborhood. But Wagner remains an Austrian-American optimist: In 20 years, the cars will be gone from Manhattan, then New York awaits a new heyday.
Something is actually happening. There are more and more car-free street blocks, some permanent, some only in the evening hours. During this research, I rode a lot with these e-bikes, which have recently become part of the Citibike network. New York has long blocked itself against the new scooters or too many new bike paths, but things have been going on since Corona. For a Midtown as Wagner imagines it and a car-free Manhattan I don’t have the imagination. But every street block that does not belong to the cars makes the metropolis of the 20th century more modern and more liveable.
The cities of the 21st century are emerging elsewhere. I think New York just stays New York: too much traffic, too much power for the money, too rich and too poor, too glittering and too broken and too burned into our eyes through Hollywood to be boring.
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