Yesterday the new membership card came in the mail. The season was supposed to start at the beginning of May, we all wished for May because we love the summer evenings on the water, out there in front of the Statue of Liberty; when the sun sets over New Jersey and Manhattan shines, when sometimes the moon is already over Brooklyn and the sea breeze blows in from the Atlantic.
Now as I write, I can see the Hudson River from our west window. No sail out there, no cruise ship, no more ferry. That won’t work out, not in May, probably not for the whole of the summer and then possibly never again.
Sailing worries are private worries, small worries, unquestionably; as well as 8.5 million passions that must now pause. Bigger things are at stake these days. It’s about Covid-19, now here too. For weeks only a few people could be tested in New York, all of us here heard the president mock the virus, the mayor sounded the alarm, saw the governor demonstrate casual seriousness. Nothing was stringent, warnings reached the city only in whispers, and no strategic preparations at all. Suddenly Covid-19 was there.
And immediately afterwards came the panic of claustrophobic confinement.
Our system, a joke: If you are sick, you still go to work, what else?
New Yorkers rumble through this city in subways that have been in need of renovation for decades and yet have never been renovated, thousands touch the same greasy handrails, there is no other way. New Yorkers live in skyscrapers with the same ventilation ducts, the same garbage chutes, they push the same elevator buttons.
New Yorkers could once walk briskly, dodging each other gracefully, but now everyone’s looking at their phones while they eat while running. They bump into each other, constantly. Two meters apart? New York, 2020? Very funny. New Yorkers know there are not enough hospital beds here. In the event of an emergency, there would quickly be too little food: Manhattan is an island.
Oh yes, and we know that the truth is that our whole system is a joke: if you are sick, you still go to work, what else, since sick people do not receive any money here and the rent still has to be paid; 70,000 homeless people do not go to a test or a doctor; and 1.1 million other New Yorkers have homes but no health insurance, so how are they going to pay for a doctor? There are also hundreds of thousands of people who are in the city illegally, those in the shadows: the nannies, cleaning ladies, construction workers who don’t want to go back to Peru or Guatemala (because they couldn’t enter again), so they don’t go to the doctor either because they are there would be registered.
This city knows it’s ill-armed. The owners of cafes are now nailing boards in front of their windows, the looting could come soon.
This city has always had both: community spirit and ruthlessness
5,200 people were infected in New York State late Thursday, and 29 had died. Up until the beginning of this week, only a few hundred people could be tested per day, in two labs. From Wednesday evening to Thursday morning, 7,584 people were then examined because several dozen other laboratories were finally ready for use. Around 2200, with this increase in the number of tests, the number of people infected immediately rose, quadrupling it in the four days since Monday, and we New Yorkers can count.
This city has always had both: community spirit and ruthlessness.
We live here because we seek encounters – the older you get, the more difficult it becomes in life to make new experiences, but something happens here for the first time every day. New Yorkers look at each other, say “what beautiful blue eyes does your son have” to strangers, it happens all the time, and where in Berlin do you have that? One of my favorite scenes of all the years: An old lady was reluctant to cross an intersection during a downpour; A young man came from behind and grabbed the woman, carried her over, put her down and walked on without a word. But New York, which is also Wall Street, is repression, is icy hardness.
And now the bars, the shops, the restaurants, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum are closing, the whole city has been closed for a long time, it has to be, and many people are becoming unemployed. All the potholes, the steam rising from the asphalt, that fits here: that’s why New York is the scene of disaster films and dark series like “Gotham”, where everything hisses and bubbles and nobody shows solidarity anymore because of the film images resemble reality.
Corona will change people. David Brooks reflected in The New York Times on “social distancing,” the question of what becomes of our sense of community when we seek help but have to move away from each other physically because the other person is the enemy – and Brooks recalled the Spanish flu of 1918, which is not anchored in the collective memory because people did not want to talk about it afterwards. They were ashamed of the people they had become.
There was no more parade on St. Patrick’s Day
I look out the other window, the Empire State Building is still glowing in northern Manhattan. It shone last Monday, St. Patrick’s Day, green and white and orange, these are Ireland’s colors. There was no more parade.
Yes, the bright lights of the big city, “bright lights, big city”, as Jay McInerny wrote, they still exist, only the people are hiding now, so are we. My view out from the 30th floor: there is Houston Street (spoken Houston, unlike Ju-sten, the city in Texas); So Houston Street is one of the arteries of this city, connecting East to West, now without cars, without pedestrians.
South of Houston (Soho means South of Houston) the crooked streets of the Wilhelminian era, when construction was haphazard, are still confusing. From Houston upwards, the grid was laid over Manhattan in 1811, “The Grid”: eleven avenues lead from south to north, 220 streets from east to west.
I was a pedestrian and cyclist down there when I was still able to leave the apartment. And the Manhattan Yacht Club was my city center, it was in 2007 when I rode my racing bike through Lower Manhattan and discovered the masts swaying in unison in Battery Park, behind the former World Trade Center.
Descending the stairs, back then, discovered the floating clubhouse; an hour later and after that actually every day we sailed out onto the river. And out there we were free.
In clubs like this in New York, bankers met actors, UNO people, politicians, writers, lawyers, all open to everyone else. That’s how the city opened up for me, that’s how I found my way in, beyond the world of correspondents. This was my New York. Everyone here has their own: New York City is the assembly of individual passions. After all, 8.5 million people live in this city because they wanted something special, because they dreamed, wanted, hoped for something; otherwise New York would have been an impertinence even before Corona, too narrow, too loud, too expensive.
A public space that only existed once on this earth
We all made a deal with the city. We sacrifice space, fold our bed out of the wall in the evening and back in again tomorrow, and we do it the other way around with the table, as usual, 45 square meters costs 3,000 dollars.
Not too bad. On the contrary. Because what we got for it was not affordable. We got a public space that only existed once on this earth.
My New York consisted of Stephanie Blythe and Anna Netrebko in the Metropolitan Opera and Al Pacino or “Hamilton” in Broadway theatres. It consisted of Daniil Trifonov at Carnegie Hall. From The Strand, the world’s best bookstore; the signed first editions are hidden on the third floor.
My New York was Bryant Park and the Center of Photography, the Moroccan Café Mogador in the East Village, the Anjelica Film Center, the Old Town Bar, the David Mitchell readings and of course my team, the Rangers, playing ice hockey , as it can never be seen in Germany, in Madison Square Garden, which can only be here.
On the left, from our north window, lies the Garden, dark, dead.
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