Silent streets and residents in exile - inside New York's Covid state of mind

The Big Apple is a shadow of former glory. But it’ll fight back, writes Jane Mulkerrins
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Jane Mulkerrins14 September 2020

One brisk night in March last year, more than 15,000 of New York City ’s great and good (plus a few fortunate members of her press) flocked to a former wasteland on Manhattan ’s West 34th Street, now a glittering paean to prosperity, a glass-and-steel altar of conspicuous consumption.

Inside the vast walkways of the billion-dollar Hudson Yards development , champagne cocktails flowed from bars every few metres, and oysters and lobster rolls were thrust into our hands as marching bands and dance troupes whooped up the well-heeled crowd … in a shopping mall. A glamorous and upscale shopping mall, admittedly, with arts venues and luxury apartments attached, but a shopping mall all the same.

Twelve months later, almost to the day, Hudson Yards closed its enormous, inordinately expensive glass doors. In the space of four days, as coronavirus swept in, the city went from advising employees to work from home to forcibly shutting all non-essential shops, along with offices, schools, museums, galleries, libraries, theatres, cinemas, bars and restaurants, until further notice.

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Five months on, those glass doors remain firmly closed, and New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has said there is “no timeline” for reopening malls. Department store Neiman Marcus, the anchor tenant at Hudson Yards, has filed for bankruptcy, prompting speculation as to whether the glittering development can ever recover.

Across the former shopping mecca of Manhattan the outlook is bleak. The ordinarily bustling pavements of Fifth Avenue are deserted, the lights off in many of the biggest stores, including the Victoria’s Secret flagship, shut since March, which has not been paying its $937,000 monthly rent. Downtown, high-end SoHo department store Barneys has closed for good. Retailers are abandoning Manhattan in droves, deeming it unsustainable; rents remain colossal, while the city is a ghost town, empty of office workers and tourists.

Broadway is officially shuttered until 2021 — tumbleweed and trash blow through an eerily empty Times Square — and with indoor dining still not permitted in the city, many restaurants, perhaps the city’s greatest draw in recent years, remain closed. Even the subway system is struggling; lockdown has led to a drop of more than 90 per cent in numbers of passengers.

Midtown should, at least, receive something of a lifeline this week with museums, including Moma and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, permitted to reopen today (with face coverings, 25 per cent capacity and social distancing).

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But New York anticipated 67 million visitors in 2020, a fifth of them from overseas; in the second week of July, the occupancy rate of city hotels was just 37 per cent, down from more than 90 per cent in recent summers.

The current US travel ban, instituted in March, prohibits non-permanent residents from entering the country from Europe, China or Brazil. Meanwhile, with Covid rates in more than half of all US states still spiking, anyone wanting to travel to New York from 32 of the nation’s 50 states, including California, Texas, Florida and Arizona, must quarantine for two weeks on arrival.

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The irony, given NY’s former pariah status in the spring — when, at the peak of the virus 600 people a day were dying in the city, and 1,000 across the state — is lost on no one.

Domestic travellers flying into the city’s three airports must complete a quarantine form on landing or face a $2,000 fine. And should they be found breaking from their quarantine (as an acquaintance did last month) even heftier fines may be levied. There’s little chance of sneaking over the border by land, either. Earlier this month, the city began erecting checkpoints at bridges, tunnels and train stations to enforce the same quarantine rules as apply to those incoming by air.

Certainly, the city’s streets have been silent and empty this summer. In my neighbourhood of Brooklyn Heights, a historic district of elegant brownstones, an estimated 40 per cent of residents moved out in the first month of coronavirus. New leases in Manhattan plunged 62 per cent in May as the exodus began to bite.

Many escaped to second homes, or parents’ homes, while the city’s elite splashed out on renting houses upstate or by the beach. One Manhattan textile tycoon reportedly spent almost $2 million renting an 11-bedroom mansion from March until September, while Rihanna is said to have paid $415,000 for a month at a Hamptons house.

The Hamptons
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Most of those fleeing the city initially presumed that exile would last a couple of months at most. Now, New York State’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, is begging the super-rich to return to help the city recover. “They’re in their Hamptons homes … I talk to them literally every day. I say, ‘When are you coming back? I’ll buy you a drink. I’ll cook,’ he quipped recently.

Out in the Hamptons, though, the economy is booming. Private, socially distanced Pilates classes cost $200 a throw, while West Village Italian restaurant Carbone has launched a pick-up service, with food to be finished at home, for $2,000 a month. And for those who do need to pop into town on business, private helicopter and seaplane company Blade is launching a Hamptons commuter pass from September. For $965 a month, clients can buy unlimited trips between there and NYC for $295 one-way (full-price: $795).

However, with waiting lists for private schools in the Hamptons now full, education/childcare might be the juiciest bait to lure families back. New York schools can reopen from next week, most on a hybrid model, with lessons partially in-person and partially online. But classroom attendance will still be limited to only one to three days a week, leaving the problem of childcare for working families for the remaining days.

One friend is considering what she calls “a reverse housewife summer commute”, leaving her financier husband to work remotely from their second home in upstate New York, while she and their five-year-old daughter spend their weekdays in the city, where she can start kindergarten several days a week.

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Another friend, who recently relocated to Washington DC — where the small private school in which they had enrolled their five year-old for this autumn will now not reopen before 2021 — is considering moving back to Brooklyn for a spell, simply so their son can start school.

One argument cited against a return to the city is the rise in violent crime; shootings are up 76 per cent this year, compared with the same period in 2019. Last weekend 43 people were hurt in 32 shooting incidents in a 24-hour period; there were four shootings in the same time period on the same weekend in 2019. De Blasio has cited the devastation to the city’s economy and jobs caused by Covid plus a slowdown in the courts and a lack of trials. The NYPD has attributed it to the bailing of suspects arrested on gun charges to try to stem the spread of Covid in jails — a policy which, they say, has created a “permissive atmosphere”, especially among gang members.

Lest it all look too gloomy, there have been positive outcomes of the pandemic. Outdoor café culture, never much of a thing in New York owing to strict licencing restrictions, is flourishing; sidewalks and parking spots can now be commandeered for creative seating, while hundreds of streets throughout the city have been closed to create space for “streateries”. Wandering through the West Village on a humid August night, where alleyways are filled with café tables and festooned with fairy lights, there’s a new, twinklingly European vibe to the city. (Though what works beautifully on balmy summer nights works less well in frigid February.)

The pandemic has also made a pin-up of our paternalistic Democratic governor, Cuomo, whose 11am daily briefings, delivering the latest morbid data on jazzy PowerPoint slides became appointment viewing, his strict but soothing leadership a salve to our spiralling anxiety. And having steered the city through the eye of the storm, he isn’t about to let things slide. “Don’t make me come down there,” he regularly warns (swoon), in response to maskless youths partying in public.

The governor’s approval rating, which topped 87 per cent at one stage of the pandemic, shows little sign of dropping, and though he denies any interest in running for president, polls have him pegged as a frontrunner for 2024. Meanwhile, though, the staunchly Democratic city is braced for anything to happen nationwide on November 3.

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The morning after the 2016 election, having barely slept, on my way from Brooklyn into Manhattan, a young woman standing near me on the subway collapsed in tears. I instinctively put my arms around her, and she sobbed into my shoulder, as several other strangers joined us in a spontaneous group hug.

New York is resilient. New York is tough. But New York also sticks together. And, eventually, New York always bounces back.