New York City has weathered a number of crises. But the city has never been as quiet as it is now. Will the metropolis regain its strength? A foray through the US metropolis.
These days you take the bike to Manhattan. The subway is still running, but the risk is too high. Dozens of New York public transportation employees have already died. So the way leads over the Queensboro Bridge to Midtown. The famous Met-Life building rises above Park Avenue, in front of which all traffic lights are red for hundreds of meters – you can actually ignore them, there are not many cars left anyway.
New York. A symbol for so many things, but certainly not for the mood of a small German town on public holidays. In the vicinity of the deserted Times Square, the wildly flickering neon advertising cannot dispel the oppressive feeling in the stomach. One wonders: “When is this over?” And: “Will New York be New York too?”
“Thank you to those who fight for our lives,” reads one of the oversized billboards that still illuminate Times Square as bright as day at night. She pays her respects to the doctors, nurses and caregivers who currently have to declare hundreds of patients dead in the city every day.
The comparison with September 11, 2001
Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the shocking figures in the morning press conferences with a firm voice. Lots of New Yorkers watch them on TV looking for something to hold on to. “He’s one of the few people I trust that if we follow the measures everything will be fine,” says architect Catherine Wilmes, who looks out of her home office in Brooklyn. The hipster hotspot Williamsburg in Brooklyn is also dead at the moment.
Cuomo keeps comparing the number of victims with the darkest day in recent New York history. “New York State lost 2,753 people at the World Trade Center on September 11,” reads a screen. Including the number of victims of the current disaster: so far more than 10,000. But the comparison with the terrorist attacks and the general war rhetoric don’t seem to fit the mood in New York.
Andrew Cuomo: The New York governor is seen as a confidant in the crisis. Every day he proclaims the numbers of the dead. (Source: dpa)
On September 11, 2001, jihadists brought terror to the streets of the center of the free world with a tremendous blow. Where today the cyclist rolls past a memorial place rather lonely. In the spring of 2020, the virus came to New York unnoticed and quietly ate its way through the densely populated districts. Nobody ran around in panic, no screams, no rubble. The dramas of the pandemic take place behind the facades of the clinics. It’s a largely silent crisis that is keeping New York in suspense these days.
Many in Harlem are rejecting the crisis
Presumably it is therefore images like those of refrigerated trucks lined up to remove the corpses or the mass graves on Hart Island off the Bronx that send shock waves into the world. For a moment they make the extent of what has just gotten tangible.
Catharina Nickel is one of more than eight million people in the city whose lives have changed almost overnight. The German actually lives in Brooklyn, but moved in with a friend in Harlem before the curfew began. Here, in the economically weaker north of Manhattan, it is also evident how differently the social classes deal with the virus.
“Here you get the feeling that a lot of people have a refusal attitude,” says the 34-year-old UN employee. People still stand together in groups and without a face mask. In contrast, the wealthy, for example from the Upper East Side, have long since moved to their summer homes on Long Island.
New York City, September 11, 2001: Thousands of people died as a result of several terrorist attacks. The corona crisis kills more quietly – and more. (Source: imago images)
The emptier streets in Harlem have also changed Nickel’s sense of security. She no longer wanted to be outside in the dark, although New York never seemed dangerous to her. “I think that has now changed a bit.” She had thought about flying to Cologne in the meantime, but that doesn’t make sense with all the travel restrictions. As a German abroad, these days you really notice for the first time how far you are from home.
Many can no longer pay the horrendous rents
More than three weeks after the “break” began, the numbers of newly infected people in New York are slowly stabilizing. Yet another facet of the crisis weighs heavier every day. Hundreds of thousands can no longer pay the astronomical rents without work, because the budget of New Yorkers is traditionally sewn to the edge. Tens of thousands of shops and restaurants are also struggling to survive. Many have closed despite being allowed to sell out-of-home food. The tour leads past windows boarded up again and again.
“Business? What business are you talking about?” Asks the employee in a laundromat when the full laundry bag is placed on the scales. More than ten kilos, after all, you shouldn’t go to stores as often as possible – even if, like so many New Yorkers, you don’t have a washing machine. The woman behind the counter says in a surprisingly good mood that this is also noticeable in the hygiene of her customers. They shouldn’t just always wash their hands: “Hands and ass, they belong together!”, She says with a dirty laugh.
The economy has to get going again – even if only gradually – in this deeply divided America everyone agrees for once. But can New York be the way it once was again? “No,” fear pessimists. “No, it gets a lot better,” say the optimists. After all, the proud city has always emerged strengthened from crises, whether from the great depression of the late 1920s or September 11th.
There is enough hope along the way. Not only when you can see the Empire State Building from almost everywhere, which – illuminated like a beating heart – keeps the pulse of the metropolis up. But also when the daily applause for the city workers has died down after 7 p.m., Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell comes to his window on the Upper West Side to blare Andy Williams’ “The Impossible Dream”.
Mitchell also had Covid-19, but he got well again. Catharina Nickel also believes that the city will get back on its feet: “New York and the New York soul will recover from it, I’m pretty sure of that.”
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