Begin in the East 80s, off Madison: waiters in surgical masks hand out sanitized menus to the regulars dining al fresco.
Across town, in the West 70s, the sirens have yielded to the familiar clang of jackhammers. In Central Park, the zoo, the playgrounds, even the carousel have reopened. Soon, schools across the city will too, but not fully.
Squint, and you can see it: New York, once the epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak, is grasping for some semblance of its old self. Five eternal months after the lockdown began, office workers have started to trickle back to midtown. A fraction of the suburban commuters are braving the Metro-North lines. Wall Street is roaring, though still mostly working from home.
Commuters wait for a Metro-North train during the morning rush hour at the Stamford station. Photographer: Gabriela Bhaskar/Bloomberg
And yet. In this August of the pandemic, boarded shopfronts and forsaken side streets point to a somber conclusion: a real recovery still hinges on the virus, which has killed more than 20,000 New Yorkers.
The numbers show a city caught in limbo. Just last week, its rate of positive Covid-19 tests fell to the lowest since the pandemic began. Yet ridership on the subway is still down by three-quarters versus last year, and the drop has been just as big on the Metro-North and Long Island Railroad. Tourism is down, crime is up and as many as a third of the city’s 230,000 small businesses may never reopen.
And thousands of New Yorkers, especially the wealthy, have departed the city — an exodus even Governor Andrew Cuomo frets will become permanent if Covid-19 drags on. The situation has led more and more people to wonder out loud whether New York City is “over.”
“It’s not the city we knew six months ago,” said Rafael Llopiz.
Llopiz, who heads a trade group for the city’s parking garages, says people aren’t in hurry to come back. In some areas, business from monthly customers is down by as much as 80%. Llopiz himself has spent most of the summer at his second home in the Hamptons. These days, it takes half the time to drive into Manhattan. The other week, driving down Fifth Avenue to his SoHo apartment, he said he hit all green lights in sequence.
Among the biggest roadblocks to New York’s recovery is the question of school reopenings. After months of heated debate in the city and elsewhere, Cuomo said on Aug. 7 that he’d authorized the state’s school districts — including New York City, the nation’s largest with 1.1 million students — to begin in-person classes this fall. Under the city’s plan, students will be in classrooms between one and three days a week. Yet with New York City public schools facing deep budget cuts and potential shortages of everything from teachers to nurses and protective equipment, many still have deep misgivings.
Earlier this month, mask-clad teachers and others marched in protest through Lower Manhattan, and the president of the city’s largest teachers union has said its members are ready to strike if their safety demands aren’t met.