Will New York recover from the pandemic?

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, solidarity was in full swing and the city had rebounded. Today, hard hit by the Covid-19 epidemic, the Big Apple faces, alone, the post-confinement.

Barely a year ago – before the modern plague hit – the luxury Hudson Yards resort in Manhattan celebrated its grand opening with plenty of champagne, unlimited oysters and a host of celebrities.

In this spring of 2020, Hudson Yards looks like a ghost town. Its sprawling 90,000 square meter shopping center has lowered the curtain, and its flagship brand, the Neiman Marcus brand, is about to go out of business.

At the end of May, the only passers-by that we could meet there were soldiers and the medical teams in charge of Covid-19 patients at the field hospital set up a stone’s throw away. They were waiting for their free meal in front of a shop transformed into a solidarity canteen. Around them paraded deliverers, men and women of cleaners, and other representatives of the civilian army of essential workers, on the front line against the coronavirus.

A history of disasters

The scene says a lot about the upheaval caused by the virus in New York, which holds the sad record, among the world’s major cities, for the heaviest death toll from Covid-19. At a time of deconfinement, New Yorkers are wondering, worried, what the future holds for them.

Even more than other mega-cities, New York concentrates aspects of urban life which, in times of virus, turn into serious handicaps: high population density, exorbitant cost of living, decisive weight of trade, culture and tourism in the local economy and heavy reliance on crowded public transport.

The recent history of New York is marked by disasters, with a common thread of a dull fear of an exodus to other cheaper and safer cities. There was the crisis of the 1970s and the widespread decay it brought about, the stock market crash of 1987, the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the financial crisis of 2008 – not to mention the hurricanes and floods.

Each time, the facts proved the cassandres wrong. The city has rebounded and reinvented itself. The September 11 attacks paved the way for a revitalization of the Downtown district and the development of Hudson Yards. After 2008, the financial capital of the planet has diversified into new technologies to compete with Silicon Valley and strengthen its appeal to a new generation of talent.

A golden opportunity to rethink the city

Carl Weisbrod spearheaded the rebirth of Times Square in the late 1980s, when Ed Koch was mayor. He has just been appointed by the current mayor, Bill de Blasio, to lead the team responsible for thinking about the revival of the city. The next eighteen months are going to be difficult, he admits, but “As long as New York knows how to use its talents, I am convinced it will recover”.

The same confidence is reflected in other city officials. For some, it is a golden opportunity to rethink New York and to rationalize the Byzantine regulations that weigh on the local economy, to attract new activities and to correct the social inequalities exposed by the crisis.

“If the city has ever known a tipping point, this is the one we live in today,

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Joshua Chaffin