Sometime in the middle of July 2020 I wrote a letter to two friends, a married couple, imploring them to come to New York. It had been months since they set foot in the city, an absence that would have been unimaginable prior to the pandemic. I think of them as New Yorkers even though they no longer call New York home. This has nothing to do with the apartment they keep here and everything to do with their spirit. They are tireless witnesses to the human experience, traveling the globe in search of pageantry and stories, always rooted in the larger than life personalities to whom they are magnetically drawn. During the initial months of the lockdown I watched over Zoom as they gradually withered and wilted. Cut off from humanity, they became subdued and melancholy as their energy returned to the earth. I felt a tremendous sense of loss. Something special was being throttled before my very eyes.
New York was the first city in America to lock down and the first to release itself. It happened much as everything does in New York: ramshackle and haphazard, fringed with impatience, but ultimately pioneering and innovative. Why is this is shit taking so long? Figure it out. No? Fuck it, let me show you how it’s done. As New York roused itself from its self-imposed slumber I was surprised when my friends did not leap at the chance to visit, to bathe in the unique energy that was blossoming in New York that summer. I realized that they didn’t know this was happening or, perhaps more accurately, that they didn’t understand the magnitude of it.
I wrote them, breathlessly describing what to me felt like urgent news:
“I gather you're uncertain if you're going to visit New York this summer. I'm writing to you privately to register my support for making the trip, recklessly and without reservation.
I'm not sure what the news is saying about the city or how it looks from afar. It is true that it is increasingly squalid, chaotic and uncertain. The halfway houses have emptied into the street, protests are less frequent but still common, store fronts are boarded up and every element of life is a negotiation with the pandemic.
It is also painfully, heart-stoppingly gorgeous. New Yorkers are very gracious to each other in times of crisis, inventive and determined, now more than ever. Life has taken to the streets. Relaxed open container laws have given the city a New Orleans-esque atmosphere in the evenings. People are dressing lavishly despite knowing that they'll be pouring with sweat and slapping at mosquitos all night. The summer sunsets last for hours and a honeyed light bathes the sidewalks. It rains briefly and heavily most afternoons (likely the result of climate change, a different apocalypse for another day) and the sky is purple and powerful afterwards.
More than that, people are handling the uncertainty with a sense of community and collaboration that is deeply inspiring. Everyone I know is taking a hard look at their lives and their surroundings and sharing their experiences. We see people often, always outdoors, and conversations tend to be substantial and stimulating. The petty gripes that used to torment us have been replaced by meaty, interesting challenges. New York suffers beautifully.”
Time isn’t always kind to such emotional exclamations, but it has been over two years since I wrote those words and I am surprised at how true they still feel.
The city and the City
Every city has a persona, a character that permeates its being. Los Angeles has always felt to me like a feminine bodybuilder: intimidating from afar but soft up close, regarding me curiously from behind heart-shaped sunglasses as it lays in an easy repose, tanning its vast, bulky body under a brilliant bronze sun. Chicago is a fat man eating his way into a heart attack, ruddy faced and hoarse, exchanging meaty handshakes in a wood-paneled dining room surrounded by half empty rocks glasses and steak bones gnawed clean. New Orleans wears a rumpled, sweat-stained suit, whistling as it stands in alleyways, grinning mischievously about secrets only it understands, its eyes growing wet and bloodshot whenever it is reminded of glories long past. San Francisco is a boy, a boy with a lot of growing up to do.
New York is a masculine woman. Tall, elegant, her hips cocked askew, she stuffs her hands in the pockets of her oversized trench coat and rolls her shoulders forward to appear larger than she already is. To the uninitiated she is supremely confident, worldly, intimidating in her effortless reserve. She laughs heartily, knows how to hold her liquor, trades insults without a care. But to those of us who know her better she is thoughtful, vulnerable, prone to worry. She falls too easily for powerful men, she loves being swept off her feet. She can be rude and vulgar - even cruel at times - but despite all that she needs reassurance. She needs care.
I am one of her loyal agents. In her embrace I have found belonging, dignity, the warmth of home. She tolerates my quirks, my idiosyncrasies. The things I am feared for elsewhere I am celebrated for here. She soothes my stubborn restlessness, quieting the voice in my head that whispers “more, more, more.” She provides amply, doles out challenge and adventure generously, leaves me utterly confident that this is where I’m supposed to be. New York is a universe unto itself. I have known her my whole life and still she surprises me, still she takes my breath away. I will never tire of this fabulous city, this heaving morass of humanity in all its splendor.
And so it was that I felt a fierce protectiveness when a noisy minority responded to the specter of the pandemic by abandoning New York. As they retreated to the suburbs they left slander in their wake, excusing their disloyalty with condescending claims about New York’s inevitable demise, each prediction delivered with a pompous certainty unique to the ignorant.
Think of it, the unlicensed temerity! To have the nerve to claim that the city would be anything less than improved by the departure of its least loyal members. The gall of these assholes, to conclude that New York wouldn't weather this storm and, what's worse, to base their claim on an experience of New York that was so often confined to its blandest and most gentrified streets. Look around us. Look at this city. The City. A city whose weight alters the very fabric of reality. A city whose buildings' glittering height and impossible density is a testament to hubris realized in steel and glass and stone. A city upon which millions of people have imposed their hopes and dreams and been richly rewarded for it. A city that allows anyone to be themselves so long as they have the will to reach for it. A city that fulfills America's promise to the world.
New York is forever shedding residents, sending them out into the world like a tree releasing seeds to the wind. The pandemic evacuation was different. I suspect many of those who retreated were recent transplants, whose connection to the city was always provisional and status conscious, an experience they wanted to have, a box they wanted to check. I wonder how many of those opinionators ever really lived here at all. Ultimately it didn’t matter. New York ate their insults, drank their worries, transmuted their pessimism into a frenzy of energy that propelled the city to the top of the post-pandemic world order, lengthening its already sizable lead over the other great metropolises in history. Their departure made New York better. Bye now, good luck with that rental property you’re working on, don’t let the door hit your asses on the way out.
A terrible prosperity
I think it is important to confide in you, dear reader, that I am not sure about any of this. New York is so stimulating that it defeats certainty. No claim about New York can be verified because New York’s fantastically complex clockwork is never in the same position twice. So I offer this disclaimer that I am not claiming to speak the truth, I am simply telling you how I feel.
The years leading up to the pandemic were unkind to New York. Swollen with money and attention, its imperfections smoothed over like the filler packed faces that now crowd its sidewalks, something about New York’s mood was off. The trouble had been brewing for some time. You could hear it on the streets, the sound of New York had changed. For as long as I can remember it was a guttural bellow, equal parts warm joke and war cry. As of late it had become a high nasal whine, uptalking as it complains about the wait for brunch or missing its favorite exercise class. Strangely manicured parks began to crop up around the city, all thronged with tourists, the most visible part of a lame effort to promote a false sense of civic harmony under the banner of “business development.”
The latest entrants to our hectic stage arrived with a vision of New York that I didn’t recognize. These colonizers took many forms, each with ambitions teetering on the very tip of Maslow's pyramid. Some were pneumatic and vacant, their eyes locked firmly on the selfie camera lens of their phone. Others washed up on our shores draped in irony and conspicuously detailed tattoos, their manner intended to convey a world-weariness at odds with their spotless porcelain skin. A few arrived with strollers carrying children named after cardinal directions or mountain ranges, both the parent and their charge each perpetually temperamental despite also being perpetually sedated. I began to hear about something called the “Brooklyn Brand,” a vomitacious flavor of pasteurized counterculture that was promising a neatly sterilized version of life in New York in which everyone looked and acted exactly like you needed them to in order to a feel a little edgy and totally safe.
All the while prices spiraled out of control, lashing across our backs like the tip of a whip, its handle gripped tightly by private equity groups speculating on our real estate to a degree never seen before, driving us to work harder, work harder, their investors need to see returns. New York has always loved money but something about the river of wealth we were surfing felt unnatural, sinister. We were becoming impoverished by this bounty, its ease was making us ill. The pageantry of ambition that has forever defined New York was starting to feel like a slog, a weary march towards an uncertain destination, each footstep taking us farther from the things that made this city great.
Change is nothing to fear. To change is the duty of great cities, but this felt different. New York was very clearly going through a phase. Falling for the wrong man again, seduced by the idea of being idle and famous in the fleeting way that accompanies wealthy youth. New York has a rich tradition of outpacing affordability and alienating its adherents but this wanton destruction of culture seemed abnormal. In barely more than a decade, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were pushed out of their homes through a series of increasingly brutal means in order to make way for a new cohort unconcerned with New York’s diversity or its capacity to nourish outcasts. New York was supposed to embrace outsiders but the new crop didn’t feel like outsiders or hustlers. They felt comfortable. They felt at ease, an ease that is deadly to New York.
I don’t think this equation is a coincidence. New York has always been improved by challenges and made worse by comfort. This contradiction is central to New York’s persistence. Nothing here shouldn’t work, and yet it does. Contention powers this city. On one level New York is ruthlessly hypercapitalist: a fecund jungle, red in tooth and claw, constantly birthing new businesses and schemes that flourish for a moment before being torn to shreds by the next generation. On another level it is extremely socialist, providing to its residents everything from ubiquitous mass transit to universal meals for children, all paid for by lavish taxes that New Yorkers regard with a cheerful weariness, something we tolerate as an act of vanity not unlike our ever upwardly spiraling drink prices.
New York exists wholly outside the spectrum of political options that most Americans choose from. Its unique effectiveness is in no way the likely result of its venal and inept political system. New York politics is arguably much more capable on a smaller scale, where various neighborhoods frequently and sometimes even successfully petition for action from the powers that be on any number of specific issues. These neighborhoods, typically superimposed over ethnic or socioeconomic enclaves, make up something like a tapestry of little villages in which people frequently recognize each other, drink at the same bars, attend the same rituals, share the same grievances. Ironically, the dream of small town America - the trust, understanding and welcoming warmth that it implies - may be most realized on the streets of New York City.
I suspect this is the one success that makes up for any amount of New York’s dysfunction. New York is extremely inviting to immigrants and newcomers and utterly fair in the sense that it treats everyone like shit at first. But once you make it over a certain invisible threshold and we’re sure you won’t turn back, then you are welcome in our ranks. I’ve seen this happen many times, heard it in conversation. “Oh, you’ve been here for how many years? Congratulations!” people will say, and mean it. No one is an immigrant for long in New York, eventually they become stained with our color. That isn’t to say that there isn’t racism or segregation in New York - there absolutely is. But it exists alongside a stupendous tolerance, a clue of sorts for how the United States might better negotiate its long and terrible history with race. I’ve never heard of an ethnic group being treated with a particular disregard or suspicion beyond the usual annoyance that blankets New York. During 9/11 our highly Jewish mayor vigorously defended the rights of Muslim Americans to build a mosque near the World Trade Center, a decision for which he was widely admired. Is it simply not in New York’s character to single out a group out as the bad people taking our jobs and ruining our way of life. Except for perhaps Australians, and even they eventually joined the team once we discovered how willing they were to flirt while smearing avocado on toast, brutal work that surely no one else would have been willing to do.
This universal acceptance has the effect of imbuing New York with a leftover coefficient of all humanity’s energy. Anyone, anywhere who wants something they can’t have, whether that be stimulation, opportunity, self respect or something rarer may come to New York and do their best to dig it out of our rocky, rootbound soil. Other great cities ossify as they became enamored with their history, growing obsessed with preserving some ideal of an age long past. New York suffers from no such impairments. We are a city composed of people seeking change, we have no time for conventions or demure taboos, velocity is in our blood. Despite the City’s hidebound bureaucracies and onerous regulations, nothing stops progress, progress at any cost. It was for perhaps this reason that the years leading up to the pandemic were so discomforting to me. New York was not going anywhere. Its terrific energy was being channeled towards some grotesque, tumorous growth. It was becoming hideous, unrecognizable.
This all changed abruptly during the pandemic. For a brief moment during that summer New York sounded like itself again. The whine retreated and its true voice returned as we linked arms in the face of what the world worried was certain doom but we knew to be a wholly manageable event.
That summer
Ever the pioneer, death hit New York hard, weeks before the pandemic became a fact elsewhere. Pragmatic to its core, New York locked down swiftly and decisively, with little of the moronic vacillations and conspiracy theories that much of the nation was indulging in at the time. I remember little of this period. Reeling from the loss of my father only days prior, I was determined to support my family and my colleagues, the latter of whom were getting little guidance from our initially cowardly then ultimately brash CEO. I had no time to reflect on my own thoughts. I didn’t feel, I just did. I woke up every day, drove down empty streets, walked through an empty office, took my seat and went to work. I wrote letters on how to apply for PPP loans, helped people interpret statistics. There was a perverse pleasure to it, the feeling of being the last man standing at the end of the world. Of seeing fear in the eyes of everyone around me and willing myself to tell them it would be ok.
Time changed during the pandemic. I believe the effect was felt everywhere, but it seemed particularly pronounced in New York. A city perpetually in frenzy was forced to slow down. I remember the feeling of time lurching forward in phases, but I cannot tell you what they were. I remember standing on line for groceries. Hearing cheering at dusk, a thank you to emergency workers. Firecrackers one week, loud car exhausts the next. Lots of weed and ice cream. Hospitals filling up and morgues overflowing. There were donations to keep local restaurants on life support, people handing out masks and safety supplies to those that couldn’t afford them. Deprived of tourism and street traffic, homeless people got mean and desperate. I remember answering complaints about how the city was getting dangerous again with a different warning: careful what you wish for, everyone’s got nostalgia for the New York of the 70s and 80s but it wasn’t all so grand.
George Floyd was murdered by a police officer. Was it springtime, maybe? I can’t remember exactly when. I could check but I won’t, I’m curious what my memory knows. Cops kill black men all the time but this one felt different. It was graphic and specific and undeniably outrageous. The usual arguments about whether the police are justified in using force seemed pathetic when confronted by video of a man pleading for his mother as a murderer wearing a badge knelt on his neck until his breath was squeezed out of him. I remember watching the video in horror, tasting bile in my throat, onlookers pleading for mercy, panic cresting into despair once it was clear that there was no going back, that this man was going to die. I swear I could see his soul departing, his heart still beating limply along as though it didn’t realize that its host was doomed. I wept when I saw it but I also felt something like hope. They finally went too far, this time things will change. It has to. They have to.
Protests exploded across the nation. No specific demands, no laws proposed. Just rage, rage that the cops can’t be trusted, that no one knows what to do about this virus, that the rich are partying out of sight, that we have endured years of terrible leadership, that everything is so unfair. Soho was looted. People seemed surprised but I wasn’t. The once storied neighborhood had become a shopping district, emblematic of a certain sort of luxury that is especially toxic in the way it aggravates longing. It was hard to feel sorry for the big brands - why do I care what happens to a generic-ass Louis Vuitton store? - but when smaller businesses got swept up in it I started to wonder where the cops were. Hunkered down, it turned out, seemingly offended by the public’s dismal opinion of them. A curious choice in hindsight: “oh you think we’re bad now? Let us show you exactly how bad we are, then you’ll want us back.” Our mayor responded with the effectiveness we had come to expect of him, by which I mean that he hid like a bitch. Plywood went up everywhere and helicopters took to the skies, unhelpfully creating the feeling of a siege. The protests intensified, right at my doorstep. Each night the Manhattan bridge became a battlefield as protestors marched into walls of baton twirling cops. I remember watching elaborately choreographed convoys of police wagons race towards the action and thinking “huh, who knew these pigs could really drive?” It was, in hindsight, another curious choice. Why make a statement on a bridge that connects two ethnically and economically diverse neighborhoods? Who were the protestors trying to convince? My 90 year old Chinese neighbor? Defunding the police is a tough sell to someone who relies on them for protection from a uptick in racial violence that was also occurring at the time because fuck it, why not.
I can’t remember when it happened or why, but suddenly we were out on the streets. It felt unreal at first, looking at an actual face in real life and not through a screen. Restaurants suddenly flung open their doors, handing out drinks in plastic cups to lines of thirsty people. Little plywood hutches housing outdoor dining rooms sprang up everywhere seemingly overnight, delighting both human and rodent diners alike. These are the days I remember most vividly. I had never seen New York like this. Undiluted by tourists it was both more itself and yet also very different. It was relaxed. Past a certain point there was no sense in working hard. There was nothing to do, nowhere to go. Rents were getting cut down and stimulus checks pouring in. It had the feeling of an experiment: New York absent the pressure of economic competition. I remember feeling surrounded by incredible warmth, patience and camaraderie. People inquiring about each other and actually meaning it. “How’re you doing?” was a real question now, an invitation to show care. Certain rituals started to form spontaneously. People watching the sunset together, dining out earlier than usual, getting roaringly drunk. I had the rare feeling of understanding that I was living through what were going to be cherished memories. I remember feeling an outpouring of love for my city, a fierce pride, the kind of pride so big that it hurts your chest, as if your heart could burst out at any moment and cheer. New York was shedding her coat, taking off her sunglasses, slipping off her boots, all those fabulous things she wears like armor so that no one can touch her. And underneath it all New York was beautiful.
It was at roughly this moment that I wrote that letter. I couldn’t put a name on it but something was happening in New York, something too important to miss. A couple of weeks later they arrived, much to my delight. Their addition to this happening made it feel whole. I was able to enjoy it more fully knowing that they were there, that they would have their own memories of it and not just second hand stories. I took a long walk with the male half of the couple. We ate mushrooms, tripped a bit harder than expected. We sat and had a margarita and I felt him get tense. I realized that there were too many people around us, probably many more than he was used to after the last few months. We set out again, chasing the sinking sun. Each street we passed presented a different tableau, New York’s creativity and drive on full display in exquisitely inventive ad hoc outdoor living spaces. I felt his tension melt away, replaced by wonder and then eventually awe. In the midst of a society that had ground to a halt we became, for a moment, a single thing in motion, something that experiences the world by its passing.
Later I told him that I will never forget that day. I haven't since.
At what cost the future
By my own measure, New York’s soul should be more at risk now than it was at the outset of the pandemic. The money is back, back in force. Wealthy tourists from around the world have flocked to the first major metropolis to fully reopen. I run into people who have recently returned, listen to them proudly report that “New York is back” and I feel pity for the experience that their fear has cost them. Even so, I no longer feel that New York is under siege as it once was. Yes, the money is back, but at least the ease is not. These next few years will be, I suspect, hard ones for the city. There is a sheer insanity to the rat race now, a raw edge it didn’t have before. I make more money than I ever have and yet I constantly notice familiar luxuries suddenly priced out of reach.
I cannot neatly explain why I feel OK with this. Maybe it is that the challenge carries its own sort of excitement. Maybe the certainty of danger is better than coasting. Maybe the pressure lends weight to our actions. While I think all of that is true, there’s more. I feel reassured by the experience of that summer. The knowledge that New York never lost its step. That the complacency of the years prior to the pandemic did not fundamentally alter New York, that in reality it is still diamond hard and just as brilliant.
Even when it suffers, New York suffers beautifully.