New York City as we knew it is dead. Long live New York.
Wong Maye-E/AP Photo
- During the pandemic, New York City has lost thousands of the small businesses that gave it its flavor.
- A coming third wave of the coronavirus has put the City That Never Sleeps on the cusp of being shuttered once again. There's nothing to do but mourn the lost and the soon-to-be lost.
- But New York's legacy is one of constant destruction and rebirth. Like a classic slice of New York pizza, Gotham is eternal.
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
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In 2016 the writer Anna Calhoun published a book called "St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America's Hippest Street." It's a fascinating history of the four-block East Village thoroughfare, which remained a hub for artists, activists, and bohemians for more than a century.
Calhoun grew up on St. Mark's Place in the '80s. It was a grim period of high crime rates, a crack epidemic, and AIDS. She's got the street credibility demanded by New York's "authenticity" scolds.
What Calhoun found in researching the book was a common thread through the decades: Everything "great" about the street eventually faded, and whatever came next was considered "inauthentic."
Describing the transitions between the '60s, '70s, and '80s, Calhoun said: "The hippies didn't much like the Beatniks and they really hated the punks. The punks didn't much like the hippies and they really hated the hardcore kids. So it's been this cycle of bohemians hating each other."
And so it goes with New York, constantly tearing itself down, always to be resurrected. New York is built for nostalgia, while also making a mockery of nostalgia.
Yet the transition to the 2020s has been different. It's not a cyclical shift or a generational evolution. It's a catastrophe of grand proportions, and it's hard to know what flowers will bloom in New York City or when.
You can't go home to New York again. That place is gone.
New York has gotten its ass handed to it by COVID.
It was the epicenter of the pandemic in the US during the worst of the first wave, from March through May. A mass exodus ensued. Businesses closed en masse. With some exceptions, public schools have yet to reopen.
New York isn't dying, but it is gravely ill.
The website Curbed published a running list of New York establishments that have permanently closed since the pandemic started. At this writing, the tally is over 500, and while it's a valiant effort, Curbed's list is in no way comprehensive.
Listing the closures in order of when the businesses opened was a devastatingly effective editorial choice. First up: the Lord & Taylor store on the Lower East Side, opened in 1826.
Then there's Empire Coffee, a Hell's Kitchen hole-in-the-wall, which somehow survived for 112 years in the forever no-man's-land around the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Two world wars, the Great Depression, New York's ungovernable '70s and '80s, the Great Recession, and hypergentrification couldn't kill Empire Coffee. COVID did.
Like most New Yorkers who didn't flee, I haven't much strayed far from home during the pandemic, which is why scrolling through the list felt like a relentless series of gut punches.
The Prohibition-era Greenwich Village speakeasy and literary haunt Chumley's, where I spent many a freelance writer's day nursing a lunch beer and soup - gone.
The Lower East Side bar Max Fish with the creepy Julio Iglesias portrait over the bar, where I'd go for postshow drinks in the early 2000s garage-rock renaissance - bye.
The comedy incubators The Creek and the Cave and Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, where I saw comedy legends, as well as tomorrow's sitcom writers and "SNL" performers for $5 a show and $2 PBRs - fare thee well.
The list keeps going and going, before finally concluding with such hard-luck businesses that were both born and killed in 2020.
The third wave of the pandemic has put the City That Never Sleeps on the cusp of being shuttered once again. There's nothing to do but mourn the lost and the soon-to-be lost.
The New York pizza slice, the envy of the world
Last week, on a rickety sidewalk table in Queens, I ordered a couple of greasy cheese slices, slid to me through a window by a Sicilian immigrant who's operated his no-frills joint for more than two decades.
I considered the masterpiece that is a good slice of New York pizza, how it remains the envy of the world, and how it's essentially immune to inflation. It'll always be working-class grub, though sought out by the rich, forever unpretentious, and impossible to improve on.
I thought about how, over the past two decades, as I shed my youth and assumed the relentless responsibility that comes with parenthood, how few of the establishments where I made my memories had survived, even before the pandemic.
New York's character is now bloody and bruised, with untold carnage still to come with another winter of lockdowns and despair. But this Queens pizza place survives in a low-trafficked area, and still churns out a reliably fantastic product for which I'll always happily fork over a couple bucks.
I miss my old New York, just as everyone who lived in and loved this city misses their New York. But I'm still nostalgia-skeptical, because professional nostalgists aren't so much historians as they are fetishists.
There's not much daylight between longing for the sexist decadence of the "Mad Men" office and lamenting the loss of the "gritty" Times Square of mafia control and depraved violence. Both places had their time, inspired some great art, and are happily relegated to the distant past. (And yes, the modern-day fluorescent tourist-trap nightmare that is Times Square is also horrible. Maybe Times Square is just meant to be awful forever.)
What's happening now, the manner in which New York is withering, isn't natural. It's tragic and exacerbated by some unscientific government restrictions that have proved to be the tipping point for a lot of struggling small businesses.
I don't know what's coming next.
It could be that all of New York gets further sanitized, and the space once held by wonderful independent businesses will soon be occupied by Chase banks, Duane Reades, and Starbucks.
Or maybe we'll be back living "The Warriors." Who's to say?
All I can be sure of is that New York as we knew it in March is gone forever, and we'll be mourning it for a long while. But the next great New York is probably coming at some point. I hope I'm still around to enjoy it when it does.
New York's perma-state of constant reinvention, including cycles of misery and neglect, is as much a part of its character as a greasy slice.
- Read more:
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- Depression doesn't take time off for a pandemic
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