There are stamps of NY they are universal. A couple of summers ago a relative came to visit. I had a desire for a local experience: to go play basketball on one of those urban courts that I had seen so much in the movies.
He fulfilled his wish in Riverside Park South, at Upper West Side. This past Thursday, a New York teenager was amazed. “They have removed the baskets!” He exclaimed as he walked through that site.
The End . The City Council has removed the rings in 80 of those facilities in the five districts. The goal is to favor “social distance” –not approaching less than 1.80 meters, theoretically– that is currently taking over. This city has become the epicenter of the coronavirus in U.S, the country in the world with the most positives, a figure that exceeds 119,000 cases, although it varies with the passing of the hours.
The amputation of the baskets illustrates the fight against a disease in a metropolis that in a few days has registered more than 30,000 infected and a minimum of 517 deceased out of a national total of more than 1,840 deceased.
New York is ground zero again. Unlike the attacks of September 11, 2001, the critical point is not exclusively located in one part of the lower Manhattan. This time it extends to all corners of the metropolis.
The Big Apple is closed. In this new daily life there is no trace of that cosmopolitan life that defines it and that made it the capital of the planet.
The Big Apple on the couch
“I would describe them as a city besieged by the coronavirus”, according to psychologist Jaime Inclán
Today a week ago the order to stay at home came into force, with the exceptions of going for a walk or shopping, and from which those who carry out essential jobs are exempt.
In order to reduce human density, cars have been pushed off some streets and made for pedestrians. “I would describe it as a city besieged by the coronavirus,” he underlines Jaime Inclan, Doctor of Psychology with more than four decades of experience in New York. “Everyone is looking at what he does and what he does not do, waiting for something to happen, hoping that it will not touch him, but with fear. We live in a state of siege without control over what is happening to us, ”he says.
En route to Bronx, the metro is considerably less traveled than usual, although the wagons still have an inadvisable occupation.
Many get off in Grand Concourse with 138. Travelers scatter on the surface. “It’s not easy to cope with this, now I’m going to get into a small apartment and there are five of us,” says Julius, an African American who is a messenger, business on the essential list.
“It’s a strange thing,” he adds, “because I like to go to work, I can go out! But I am also afraid of exposing myself.”
Once in Harlem on the east corner of 125th and Malcolm X Boulevard, a group of people talk at the door of an establishment. As if nothing. “What to stay at home? In what house ”, one replies. A patrol car circulates there and the public address system reminds us that this is a health crisis and that “distance must be kept”. Concentrates ignore.
Epicicenter of the crisis
9/11 had its critical point in lower Manhattan, the virus covers the Big Apple
Despite these exceptions, the streets of an energy metropolis look almost empty. “At first glance it looks like a dystopia, a story that writers like Cormac McCarthy, this resembles your book Road ”, He comments on that loneliness Kirmen Uribe, poet and storyteller, who settled on West 79th Street in Manhattan in 2018 after receiving a grant from the Public Library New Yorker and who now teaches at the Barnard College.
In 2008 he published his novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao , with which he won the national prize for literature (narrative). This is not the metropolis that attracted him, that of his readings, his films or his music. “It is sad, because New York is not its buildings but its people and its dynamism. Announcements Times Square they are on, I don’t know for whom ”, he reflects.
The Big Apple has suffered numerous destructions in fiction. Godzilla, King Kong, the Martians or the apes, to name just a few devastating forces in the metropolis.
But this situation is more reminiscent of that supposed neutron bomb of the Cold War, which, they claimed, killed citizens while leaving the environment intact.
“This situation is more scary – Uribe points out when commenting on the cinema of destruction – and, in addition, I am concerned about health, the jobs that are going to be lost, what salaries will these people live on? There are places that maybe not will reopen. They close shops and also close memories ”.
Walking through these streets, in which the essence of a city is denied, which is social proximity, provokes a rare sensation of awareness in the face of danger and, at the same time, of beauty due to the effect of that emptiness. Or as express Leopoldo Maria Panero in his book The last man : “The twisted, exotic imagery follows a technique, that of contrasting beauty and horror, the familiar and the creepy (the unfamiliar, or disturbing, in Freudian jargon) ”.
The literary vision
“The Times Square ads are up and I don’t know for whom,” says Kirmen Uribe
“I do not experience this time of empty streets with sadness. I think that paradoxically it is a time of hope, we are all doing this by staying home together ”, he emphasizes. Todd Chanko, a thoroughbred New Yorker, born and raised in Manhattan. former media analyst (Showtime and WNYC-TV), which made the leap to Wall Street (Deutsche Bank) and that has been managing its own portfolio of securities for ten years.
“People are being very creative, we have organized meetings with friends in Zoom. We sat down with a drink in hand, music and we felt it as something normal, “he says.
“My mother – he adds – lived in New York during the Second World War. At night everything was off. The blinds must be down. They were afraid that the light would serve as a signal for the German fighter planes. This is how existence was then and it was not forever. We won the war ”.
This city of cities has overcome other moments of serious turbulence. The effects of Sandy, the hurricane of October 2012, still feels today with the inconveniences generated by the repair of a subway tunnel.
However, due to the scale of the tragedy, the comparison that emerges in any conversation refers to the terrorist coup of September 11, 2001, which brought down the Twin Towers and caused three thousand deaths.
“This is a different time. We can express solidarity by staying home, in a way it increases the sense of community. I get angry when I see people on the street through the window. It makes me angry if a friend calls me and says he’s going to the park. No! Being at home means being at home, ”says Chanko
The novelist’s vision
In front of the social distance, Lago remembers the 12-S of the 2001 with the people in the street
“It’s not the same as 9/11,” says Inclan, founder and director at the Lower East Side from the Roberto Clemente center, aimed at an immigrant and poor population. “If there is something in common, it is that a crisis of this magnitude leaves us all very clear about something that we are not normally so clear about, and that is that we all live under the shadow of death,” he continues. “We forgot about that. When the towers fell, people ordered their priorities and now they are starting to do the same. But that attack was a specific thing and this is progressive, that is why it is different ”, he remarks.
“As I am not going to be aware of the contagion with the continuous sound of the ambulance sirens”, confesses a woman in the surroundings of Roossevelt Avenue, area of Q ueens very popular with a great mix of origins that has been left in the dark. That woman’s apartment is next to the Elmhurst Hospital, one of those that registers the highest mortality from the virus, where queues are made to undergo the test and a venue that highlights the shortcomings of public health in the United States: there are no beds and basic material such as respirators.
“This crisis is, in certain respects, the mirror image of post 9/11,” he says. Adam Gopnik in T he New Yorker . But he clarifies: “The social remedy is the opposite of the union of all that existed in the days and weeks after 9/11 and that made it bearable”
The writer and university professor Eduardo Lago, winner of the 2006 award Nadal, among others, with his novel Call me brooklyn , has been living in the city for 32 years. He is one of those who does not leave his apartment. “New York,” he explains, “is a city that has stories of catastrophes, but this is different and new. Seeing the empty streets is something unusual. It’s the opposite of 9/11. There are internal connections, the internal damage is the same, but not the external ones. I remember September 12 with people on the street, talking, some of them took out the television ”.
Pure New Yorker
“It makes me angry if a friend calls me and says he’s going to the park; No, you have to be at home “
Time of silence. For Lago that silence is symbolized by the fire station next to his building, near Washington Square. “I don’t know why, but they stopped making noise,” he says. On the contrary, some friends who resided next to a hospital, in the Upper East Side, they have moved. They could no longer bear those ambulances 24 hours a day.
This is the symbol of New York in times of coronavirus.
“The city will change”, diagnoses Inclán. Remember that after the attack it was said that it would be a phantom metropolis, but that did not happen. How will it change? It is unpredictable – he emphasizes -, but the buds of freedom and creativity that make up the spirit of New York will bloom again ”.
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