New York

The Searing Memories of the Pandemic’s Early Days

Published

1 year ago

March 11, 2025

The Searing Memories of the Pandemic’s Early Days

Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll look at the pandemic, five years after it exploded in New York. We’ll also look at a contest to make a Manhattan, a cocktail with a history.

We knew it was coming. Five years later, we are still trying to make sense of it.

I remember spending almost a week in late January 2020 reporting a story that we published under the headline “Coronavirus in N.Y.: Without Chinese Tourists, Business Sags.” This was before the first cases in New York had surfaced.

The article said that demand for hotel rooms in tourist destinations like New York was already dropping. “It’s all stopped — zero,” said a travel agent in Flushing, Queens, who arranged tours of Manhattan, mainly for visitors from China. “No Times Square, no Empire State Building, no Metropolitan Museum, no Wall Street, no United Nations.”

The first confirmed case in New York City was reported on March 1. Then, in a prelude of what was to come, part of New Rochelle, N.Y., just north of the city, was sealed off as a “containment zone.” A lawyer who lived there and worked in Manhattan had contracted the virus. The neighbor who had driven him to a hospital had come down with it. More than 100 people with whom he had come in contact at his synagogue were told to go into quarantine at home.

The lawyer recovered. Many did not. In New Jersey, a family had dinner together, as they often did. Within days, four were dead, and an aunt died soon afterward.

In New York, more than 46,000 people have died of Covid-19 or its complications. In the next few days, other colleagues will look at how New York is still piecing itself together.

I wonder now if we have forgotten how unimaginable it all was.

How the city’s hospitals were pushed to the limit.

How refrigerated trucks were turned into temporary morgues and parked in the streets.

How the Navy sent a 1,000-bed hospital ship to a pier on the West Side, and how tents for a 69-bed field hospital went up in Central Park.

How fearful everyone was. “Direct human connections, the oxygen of city life, carried the threat of mortal danger,” Robert Snyder, the Manhattan borough historian, wrote in a new book of oral histories, “When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers.” “Would someone’s cough infect you with Covid-19, setting off a catastrophic cascade of events that would lead you to die alone in a hospital bed? There was no way to know.”

How the oxymoronic phrase “social distancing” became a part of everyday conversation. How the initialism “wfh,” for work from home, did, too.

How the sounds of the city changed as sirens wailed day and night from ambulances carrying sick people to hospitals, often when it was already too late — and how, in the moments when those sounds subsided, the streets were eerily quiet.

How, every night at 7 p.m., an informal pots-and-pans anthem of thanks paid tribute to frontline workers.

On March 5, two editors appeared at my desk and assigned me to write “Coronavirus Update,” a daily summary built around The Times’s reporting. I began the first one this way: “The sense of crisis brought on by the coronavirus deepened on Thursday …” Two patients had tested positive in the city, a man in his 40s and a woman in her 80s. Neither had a connection to anyone who had tested positive for Covid-19. Stealthily, speedily, the virus was spreading.

I had no idea that I would spend the next 15 months writing “Coronavirus Update.” The pandemic did not feel over when the last “Coronavirus Update” column was published in May 2021, before the Delta variant had been given a name and the Omicron variant had appeared.

The world has mostly moved on, and New York is coping with legacies of the pandemic, like the lingering perception that the city is less safe than it was, especially the subways.

I wrote in one of the last “Coronavirus Update” columns that it had been clear almost from the beginning of the pandemic that Covid-19 had had a disproportionate impact on minority and low-income communities. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that Black and Hispanic coronavirus patients were hospitalized at a rate nearly five times that of white patients. They were also more likely to have lost their jobs.

Nowhere was that clearer than in New York City, as we will see later in the week when my Times colleagues look at different measures of how New York is faring.

Mayor Eric Adams marked a milestone in 2023 when he announced that the city had regained the 946,000 jobs lost in the pandemic. But the job picture is muddied by a disturbing fact: Many of those new jobs pay less than those lost during the pandemic. While I was writing this, I got an email from a travel website that said there had been a 9 percent drop in pay when adjusted for cost-of-living increases since December 2020.

And jobs are only one element of life that the pandemic upended.

Snyder made a point that I thought about as this week approached. By 2020, the influenza epidemic of 1918 had been forgotten by many people, but not by historians and epidemiologists.

There’s no way to know what we will remember years from now. But for New Yorkers whose friends or relatives were among the more than 46,000 killed by the virus in New York City alone, is there any doubt that the pandemic will be forever in our memories?

Weather

Expect a clear sky with temperatures reaching into the 60s. At night, it will be mostly clear with a low around 42.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Friday (Purim).

“A manhattan is not my usual,” Holly Leicht said. “But I’m willing to do it for research’s sake.”

Leicht, the executive director of the nonprofit Madison Square Park Conservancy, was standing at the bar in the Edition Hotel, opposite the park her group raises money for. The “research” was preparation for the Manhattan Mix-Off, an event in which bartenders from four nearby establishments will compete to create a Madison Square Park manhattan.

Which is appropriate, Leicht said, because the manhattan got its name in the neighborhood.

Leicht buys into most of the story about the origin of the drink — how it was named for the Manhattan Club, which occupied the Gilded Age mansion built for Sir Winston Churchill’s grandfather. She discounts the part of the story that holds that Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was present at its creation, during a banquet after Samuel Tilden was elected governor of New York in 1874.

“Lady Jennie was far gone from America” and married to Lord Randolph Churchill by then, Leicht said. The Manhattan Club did not move into the mansion until 1899. And Tilden is perhaps better remembered for having lost the presidency to Rutherford Hayes in 1876 even though he won the popular vote.

William Grimes, in his book “Straight Up or On the Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail,” points to an account that credited the manhattan to a saloonkeeper named Black. But Leicht said it was unnamed “until the Manhattan Club made it their signature drink.”

“It was the New York City drink, and why?” she said. “New York was the city of bars. A lot of people perfected a lot of drinks.”

METROPOLITAN diary

Sunny side

Dear Diary:

On a recent cold day, a friend and I met for lunch at a restaurant on the Upper West Side.

When we came outside, we had the light to cross Amsterdam Avenue, so cross we did, onto what turned out to be the sunny side of the street.

Click to comment

New York

Inside the NYC Power Stations That Keep Trains Moving — or Bring Them to a Halt

Published

11 hours ago

April 20, 2026

Press Room

Inside the NYC Power Stations That Keep Trains Moving — or Bring Them to a Halt

It was one of the worst commutes in years. A power outage stranded more than 3,500 New York City subway riders in stuffy, crowded train cars for more than two hours on Dec. 11, 2024, during the evening rush.

Firefighters evacuated riders from the disabled trains, but not before some passengers were forced to relieve themselves between cars, according to people who were present. The ensuing delays, which affected the A, C, F and G lines in Brooklyn, stretched well into the morning, snarling the commute for thousands more riders.

But the foul-up didn’t start on the tracks — it began about 40 feet beneath the sidewalk, in a concrete bunker called a substation, like this one.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs the New York City subway, operates 225 of these substations. They provide the electricity that keeps trains moving.

Some are deep underground, while others are in fortresslike buildings close to train tracks. Dozens of the facilities are nearing 100 years old, and some components have gone decades without substantial upgrades.

The electrical outage in 2024 started after a critical failure in a Downtown Brooklyn substation that dates to the 1930s. Heavy rainfall most likely seeped into equipment and caused an explosion so forceful that it knocked a door off its hinges, according to the M.T.A.

Without adequate electricity, trains that were closest to the damaged substation could not move, and their ventilation systems shut down.

Such major failures are rare, but are responsible for some of the subway’s worst logjams, said Jamie Torres-Springer, the head of the authority’s construction and development division.

“That’s what causes the most difficult, painful disruptions in the system that drive people out of their minds,” he said.

In hopes of preventing the next nightmare commute, the M.T.A. is making the biggest investment in power in its history. Transit officials plan to spend $4 billion on new power systems by 2029, including upgrades to 75 subway substations. That’s three times as many as were renovated during the last major round of repairs, which ended in 2024.

They have their work cut out for them.

Hidden beneath a steel-trap door on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, 36 steps below the surface, is one of the system’s oldest remaining substations.

“This is a blast from the past,” said David Jacobs, the M.T.A.’s acting general superintendent for power stations, who donned a hard hat and safety glasses on a recent weekday before disappearing into the underground space.

The substation, near 73rd Street and Central Park West, was built in the 1930s, and is expected to be renovated during the current blitz.

A dirty tarp hung in one corner of the cavernous room, to catch water that seeped through worn concrete. Rows of machines hummed with the constant surge of power feeding the electrified third rail on nearby tracks.

It takes about 2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity to run the subway system annually. That’s enough power to light 128,000 homes for a year.

The substations’ main function is to convert raw, high-voltage electricity from the electrical grid into lower-voltage power that can be delivered to the third rail.

But the aging equipment has become progressively less efficient and reliable, and harder to maintain.

The substations are spaced out across the city, to help keep electricity flowing to trains even if one of them malfunctions. But the equipment has sometimes failed when asked to carry an extra load, leading to cascading problems.

Last year, there were 758 “major incidents” on the subway, ones in which 50 or more trains were delayed. Substations cause a small but disruptive share of the problems, according to M.T.A. data.

Every time a nearby train passes, it pulls electricity from the substation. A series of gauges, each corresponding to a train track, tick up as power is transmitted. The heavier the train, the more power is pulled.

“Power is everything,” said John Ross, a recently retired transit worker who was dispatched to help after several service disruptions in the subway, including the outage in 2024. “When it breaks, it breaks good.”

M.T.A. officials assessed the condition of every substation in recent years, and found that 36 percent of the equipment was in poor condition or in need of replacement.

While the main purpose of the upgrades is to reduce train delays, the changes have other benefits. The M.T.A. is installing a new signal system that relies on wireless technology to automatically control train movement.

The system, known as Communications-Based Train Control, or C.B.T.C., will allow trains to operate more reliably. It will also enable transit workers to monitor train traffic more closely from a dedicated room in Midtown Manhattan, known as the operations control center.

But switching to that signal system requires upgrading the rest of the subway’s archaic equipment. “In order to run more trains, we need more power,” Mr. Torres-Springer said.

For Mr. Jacobs, 36, who joined the M.T.A. nearly two decades ago as an electrical apprentice, working with machines younger than him would be a welcome change.

Today he runs a department of almost 400 people, and much of the work remains hands-on: diagnosing problems in the machinery by reading small flags with numbered codes, searching for replacement parts that are no longer manufactured, and generally eking out more life from obsolete machines.

“I do love this equipment,” he said with a smile.

But he’s ready for an upgrade to something built in this century.

“It’s like a B.M.W. versus a 1940 Cadillac.”

New York

Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein

Published

2 days ago

April 18, 2026

Press Room

Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein

Film

Leo McCarey’s “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937). The Criterion Collection

‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey

The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.

The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”

Tippy Walker (left) and Merrie Spaeth in George Roy Hill’s “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). United Artists/Photofest

‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill

The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.

The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.

Rip Torn (left) in Milton Moses Ginsberg’s “Coming Apart” (1969). Courtesy of the Everett Collection

‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg

The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.

The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.

Don Murray and Diahn Williams in Ivan Nagy’s “Deadly Hero” (1975). Courtesy of the Everett Collection

‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy

The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.

The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.

Chantal Akerman’s “News From Home” (1976). Collections Cinematek © Fondation Chantal Akerman

‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman

The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.

The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”

Michael Wadleigh’s “Wolfen” (1981). Orion/Courtesy of the Everett Collection

‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh

The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.

The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.

Seret Scott in Kathleen Collins’s “Losing Ground” (1982).

‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins

The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.

The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”

Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours” (1985). Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection

‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese

The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.

The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.

A scene from Edo Bertoglio’s “Downtown 81” (1980-81/2000). Courtesy of Metrograph Pictures

‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio

The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.

The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

13 Actors You Should Never Miss on the New York Stage

Published

3 days ago

April 17, 2026

Press Room