Corona is destroying the “Big Apple”.
New York wants full streets back
01/01/2021, 8:28 p.m
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After one of the hardest years in the history of New York, the city of over a million inhabitants begins to fight for its future: How quickly can the city bring back life, guests, something special after a hard Corona winter? Tourism experts paint a bleak picture.
The Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center lights up into the New Year, special offers in the shop windows of 5th Avenue lure people after the holidays, Manhattan’s ice rinks are open and well frequented at least since the first snowfall shortly before Christmas. Some New York traditions have withstood the coronavirus pandemic.
But they cannot hide the fact that there are no crowds in the street canyons to marvel at the winter attractions. The corona pandemic brought New York to its knees in an unprecedented way in 2020. The city plans to pick itself up again next year. But the aftermath of the crisis is likely to be felt for a long time.
Vincent Lin is one of the few who are currently swimming against the tide in New York. While hundreds of restaurants in the city have been forced to close in recent months, in October 2020 he opened his “Blue Willow” with traditional Chinese cuisine in the heart of Midtown Manhattan.
Without tourists it looks bleak
“It’s not like we thought it was the right time,” Lin says. Actually, the “Blue Willow” should have opened before the pandemic. But there were delays, then the Corona crisis dominated the city and Lin’s team had to improvise, as he says. Customers are now scarce because Midtown lacks tourists and office tower employees. It is unclear when they will come back. At least the next few weeks are expected to be gloomy, say Covid experts.
But the vaccinations that have started give hope for spring. At first it had looked good for the metropolis. While some infections were already known on the west coast, it took until early March 2020 for the first official case to be confirmed in New York. But then only a few weeks passed before pictures of refrigerated trucks in front of hospitals and mass graves on an island off the city caused horror around the world.
The New Yorkers soon drew a parallel to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which killed around 3,000 people. But the comparison seems wrong. Terror hit with a tremendous bang. In 2020, on the other hand, the virus ate its way unnoticed through the skyscrapers, blocks of flats and subways for weeks. No open panic and no debris, but as with terror, the shock remained.
20.200 Corona-Tote
To date, the city has reported 20,200 deaths on its website as corona victims, plus around 4,800 people who probably died as a result of the virus. At least hundreds of thousands of the eight million inhabitants are ill. The price for the unprecedented countermeasures: offices, museums, Broadway and concert halls closed. “The very things that make New York New York have been undermined by the pandemic,” Moody’s economic analyst Mark Zandi recently told the New York Times.
More than a million jobs were lost, especially in the service sector – in restaurants, hotels, in the arts, transport and on construction sites. In the meantime, the unemployment rate has risen to more than 20 percent, and the city is struggling with a gigantic budget deficit of four billion dollars. The pandemic also revealed the major differences in the multicultural New York society. The poorer you were, the greater your existential fear and the more likely you were to contract Covid-19. The wealthy, on the other hand, were able to leave the city.
What New York needs again are tourists and brisk business. The New Yorkers are sure that both will come back. There are several promising vaccines, two are already in use. They got tens of thousands. If a few hundred thousand doses are distributed in the city and risk groups are protected, the situation could ease up quite a bit.
Will everything be the same again in 2024?
With spring, the travel bans from Europe, for example, could also be relaxed. The Broadway comeback is planned for May. But the New York City Tourism Authority expects business with vacationers to return to pre-pandemic levels in 2024.
The news portal “Axios” speculated in September that the sharp drop in rents could help the metropolis to revive and attract a wave of young and creative residents. At first, however, the Americans fear the “very dark winter” for which newly elected President Joe Biden has prepared them in view of the increasing number of infections.
New Yorkers fear renewed isolation. Families are stocking up again. Singles are looking for a lockdown partner. And like almost everywhere in the country, the number of people currently infected is rising again to the level of spring. The hospitals are reporting increases in occupied intensive care beds and in the week around the holidays 200 deaths were reported instead of a few isolated cases.
The next few months will also be crucial for restaurant owner Vincent Lin. “Right now it’s not too bad, but if new restrictions come and dining in restaurants is banned again, it will be problematic,” he says. He could hold out until April, at the latest May. If things get better by then, the “Blue Willow” will come through.
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