The New York I love will come back.
I’ve lived in New York for 866 days. 164 have been under some version of a lockdown. For nearly six months the city I’ve fallen in love with has been sick with a disease that has left it on life support. I’ve walked the empty streets and felt the same as seeing a sick a friend in the hospital — shocked at something you love looking so different, so unlike them.
Almost every day I read something about how New York will never recover, written by someone with too much money and not enough perspective. I’m a hopeless optimist and I love this city too much not to stand up for it.
New York is sick, without doubt. But it won’t die. Like the majority of the people who’ve caught this disease, New York will recover. Here’s why.
The arguments for New York’s imminent passing usually say the same few things. New York is too expensive. You can have a much bigger apartment somewhere else. The subway is terrible. Other places are so much cleaner. So people have already left (on this point, the talented and otherwise sensible woman who cuts my hair insists that “everyone” has left, a comment she makes whilst we’re both in her Midtown salon, lending the conversation a pleasingly existential edge).
All of these accusations are, to a word, completely true. However, all of them have always been true.
Covid didn’t set the rent, or give us the terrible landlords, or the garbage smell in the summer or the “fuck-it’s-so-cold-i-think-my-face-is-dead” winters. It didn’t make us all live on top of each other in a city that is hilarious overcrowded, lacks the most basic infrastructure, is so noisy that you can never really sleep and (I‘m being generous here) is so badly run that often it barely functions at all.
Living in New York has never made any damn sense, and it never will.
Except, of course we love it. We love it because in this city, you can feel things, that you’ll never feel anywhere else. Walking in The Ramble. Watching the sun set over the Hudson. A rooftop bar in Williamsburg with friends you know you‘ll never lose. Losing yourself in The Met. Heading to a house party and find the host has a nightclub in his basement (this happened). That view from the ferry. Yankee Stadium. Street art in Greenwich. The guy in Washington Square Park who lets you lie down under his piano, and the million other random things you can see just walking thorough the city for an afternoon.
New York only started to make any sense to me once I realized that it’s basically ten million people expressing themselves simultaneously. This place is pure fucking magic, and the people who live here know it.
Other cities have parks, and museums, and rivers, but they don’t have these ones and they never will. I read one story that argued New York was dead because the author knew someone who had left and moved to Phoenix. I’ve been to Phoenix, a lot, and it is a city of fine people, but that’s like watching a friend with low self esteem decide to date someone who is way below their league — you’re polite about it, but you know they’re wrong and at some point they’ll get the therapy they keep talking about.
My point is this. Right now, New York is sick. But it will get better. It’ll take time (we don’t know how long), but the problems this disease has caused are temporary. If people didn’t want to pay the rent, or put up with the rats, they’d never have moved here in the first place, and losing a few dollars off the cost of an office in Midtown isn’t going to kill anyone.
We’ve all lost so much of what we love about this city, and I understand why some people don’t want to be here right now. But all of those things will come back, and the soul of New York will be back with them, stronger than ever.
I can’t wait.