NEW YORK – Pamela Puchalski still remembers how scary she felt when COVID-19 changed the life of her neighborhood in New York City last March.
The first infections, the first restrictions and the first deaths quickly arrived. No answers found, just warnings: stay away from work, from school, from restaurants and bars, from shops and theaters, and especially from each other.
“It was that feeling … like you can’t trust your neighbor,” Puchalski said.
A year later, the country’s largest metropolis, with a hustle-and-bustle soul and 24-hour experiences, is adapting and showing a new life. The renewal is evident in the stream of customers waiting on the other side of the Plexiglas-covered counter at the Artuso Patisserie in the Bronx, in the laughter of the outdoor eating sheds built on the streets in front of the restaurants, the parks full of picnics, birthday parties and dance parties, despite the winter chill.
“What is the alternative? Just close the doors and stay home? “Asked Gloribelle Perez, who opened a restaurant with her husband in East Harlem just months before the pandemic hit.
For weeks after the virus reached New York, the strictest warnings prevailed. Closed businesses. Thousands of people left the city. The only sounds in the streets were the sirens of the ambulances. Many saw it as a death sentence for the city, a tear in the fabric that might not be repaired.
In some neighborhoods it is still quiet, almost dying, especially in places that depend on tourism in downtown Manhattan and in the Financial District, where companies have made a total shift towards remote work. Rental signs and bricked-up storefronts mark the business strips of the five boroughs.
But New York City is not a “ghost town,” as former President Donald Trump called it in October.
In crowds, on steps and sidewalks, people now rest with friends, who wear their face masks and are 6 feet apart. Companies are welcoming customers after laying down plastic sheeting to protect tellers and taping the floor to keep customers physically distant.
The newly approved $ 1.9 trillion federal COVID-19 aid package also gives cause for hope, as city officials say it will offer nearly $ 6 billion in direct aid to New York, as well as money for emergency systems. public transportation and funds to help restaurants survive.
Pérez and her husband have worked hard to keep their Latin and Mediterranean-inspired restaurant, Barcha, afloat, reducing staff and changing the menu to make the kitchen more efficient. They are also making a few extra bucks by offering pandemic-related necessities like disinfectant sprays, wipes and toilet paper.
“I didn’t get that far, just to get that far,” Perez said. “I didn’t, so we’ll keep going until the wheels go off.”
Not even the snow has kept Zeynep Cathay away from the weekly dance session she now performs outdoors in a Brooklyn park.
The clinical psychologist and dance movement therapist began the sessions in the warmer months of the summer simply as a way to get together with a friend and get some physical activity. The gatherings grew and became a way of marking the passage of time, distorted by the endlessness and isolation of the pandemic that has killed more than 530,000 people in the United States.
“It never occurs to you that one can endure all these conditions,” he laughed. “I think this is what New York is all about… really creative solutions and the freedom to think about these possibilities.”
The city began a series of bleak anniversaries this week.
Friday marked a year since Broadway theaters closed and mass gatherings were banned. The city’s roughly 30,000 victims of the pandemic will be commemorated Sunday in a virtual ceremony marking one year since the first known death from COVID-19 in New York. Tuesday marks a year since public schools closed. They have since reopened, but most children still learn remotely from home.
There are still new cases of COVID-19, around 2,500 per day on average, and around 2,900 COVID-19 patients are currently in the hospital. But it is nothing like the first terrifying wave of April, when more than 12,000 people were hospitalized and 3,100 in intensive care on the worst days. During a 10-day stretch last April, the city averaged 750 deaths per day. This week it has averaged 61 deaths per day.
The city’s cultural institutions and organizations sought solutions when the pandemic disrupted year-long concerts, festivals, performances and special events.
Puchalski joined the effort, as CEO of Open House New York, which typically offers tours of iconic landmarks and other behind-the-scenes looks at the city’s architecture.
They switched to virtual tours, which had the advantage of allowing people outside of New York City to participate, and added events like scavenger hunts, to give people an experience they could do themselves and be physically distanced.
“We have learned to adapt,” he said. “I don’t feel that threat that I felt last year.”
The switch to virtual activities helped in some way, but it was clearly not enough, said Theodora Boguszewski, co-producer of Porch Stomp, an organization that promotes American folk music through an annual music festival and other events.
When it came time for their annual event in June, the usual Governor’s Island venue wasn’t available, so the group shifted performances to the front porches and porches of people’s homes.
“Really, we really feel a kind of sense among our community, this need for live events in person,” he said.
That’s the appeal of New York City, he said, and part of the reason New Yorkers have worked so hard to adapt, to find the way forward.
“There is something about that energy and the intersection of different types of people coming together, and that is why I am here,” he said. “And if that’s the reason I’m here, I feel like I’m going to have to keep doing it in any way that I can.”
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