New York

How NYC Has Changed Since the Covid Pandemic

Published

1 year ago

March 13, 2025

How NYC Has Changed Since the Covid Pandemic

The millionaires returned. Others are eyeing the exits.

New York City lost, on net, close to 350,000 residents from 2020 to 2023. Policymakers were particularly worried about the departure of the very wealthy and its impact on the city’s tax base.

In the first two years of the pandemic, the city lost about 17,500 residents from the top 1 percent of income earners — those making $815,000 a year or more. Though small in number, that loss represented a 20 percent decline in ultrawealthy residents, according to Emily Eisner, the chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute.

But the fears were overblown. The latest census estimates show the city’s population beginning to rebound in 2023 and 2024, growing by 121,893 people over that period.

In 2023, the net total of very rich residents leaving the city was virtually flat, and a strong stock market early in the pandemic helped mint more millionaires.

Still, other vital groups in the city were more likely to leave.

Households with children under 6 years old were more than twice as likely as households without young children to leave the city in 2023. And while migration trends have largely returned to prepandemic norms, Dr. Eisner said, Black residents were still twice as likely as white ones to leave — a trend that predates Covid-19.

Not since the Great Depression have so few babies been born in the city, and school enrollment is falling.

The rush of school-age children out of New York City during the pandemic has left behind a population that is getting older and having fewer babies.

There were 99,000 babies born in the city in 2021 and 2022 — the fewest in any year since the late 1890s other than 1936, during the Great Depression.

Attendance in New York City’s public schools, the largest system in the country, is the lowest it has been in four decades. There are 111,000 fewer children enrolled in public or private school in the city than in the 2018-19 school year.

Change in school enrollment since the 2018-19 school year

Source: New York State Department of Education

The New York Times

Immigrants helped reverse population loss.

More than 230,000 migrants have arrived in New York City since spring 2022, an immigration wave that has been the largest in American history. Thousands were bused from the southern border by order of the Texas governor, but many arrived in New York on their own.

Their arrival has helped stem the city’s population decline. New York City ended last year with 8.48 million people, up from 8.39 million in 2023. But it is still down more than 262,000 people compared with 2020.

Jobs are back. But growth is mostly in low-wage industries.

No city lost jobs like New York. Two months into the pandemic, more than a fifth of workers were unemployed.

So it was celebrated news when, in the fall of 2023, Mayor Eric Adams proclaimed that the city had regained all 946,000 private-sector jobs that had been lost, a year ahead of some predictions.

But most of the new jobs were in lower-paying industries. Home health care, a sector that pays an average of $31,800 a year, grew 45 percent from December 2019 to December 2024, more than any other industry.

At the same time, a wide swath of middle-income jobs that provide many immigrants and young people a toehold in the economy have shrunk. The retail industry, which pays workers an average of $56,200 per year, shed 54,100 jobs from December 2019 to December 2024, a 15 percent drop.

The construction industry, which pays an average of $93,300 a year, often without requiring a college degree, lost 30,700 jobs over the same period.

Construction jobs in New York City

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Note: Data is not seasonally adjusted.

The New York Times

The wage gap is widening…

In much of the country, the pandemic actually reduced income inequality, as lower-paid workers took advantage of a tight job market and a rising minimum wage in many states.

Not in New York.

In the city, most of the wage growth since the pandemic has accrued among the highest-paid workers, according to the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

In fact, while low- and middle-wage workers’ income largely stagnated from 2019 to 2024, the highest earners — in fields like finance, tech and information — saw their hourly wages soar, said Mohamed Obaidy, an economist with the center.

Those top-earning workers, who made $312,000 or more last year, have seen their average hourly wages grow four times faster since 2019 than workers in the bottom fifth of wage earners, who made less than $36,000 in 2024. Middle-income workers did not fare much better.

“For the top 3 percent, the post-Covid period is the golden era,” Mr. Obaidy said.

…and poverty is soaring.

More than 2 million New York City residents, or one in four, could not afford basic necessities like shelter, food and clothing in 2023, according to one recent survey. That represents the highest poverty rate in the city since at least 2015, said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia School of Social Work, which conducted the survey. The findings were in line with census figures, which also showed a rise in poverty since the pandemic began.

A family of two adults and two children was considered in poverty if the household made less than $47,190 a year. The median household income in the city in 2023 was about $76,500.

Percentage of the population below the poverty line

Source: Census Bureau American Community Survey (1-year estimates)

The New York Times

The surge in poverty was driven by two major factors. Government aid instituted during the pandemic, including an expanded child tax credit and cash payments to low-income families, ended at the same time that the cost of rent and household goods went up.

High inflation stretched people’s budgets nationwide, but in New York, according to the Columbia survey, the poverty rate was nearly double the national average. That’s because of the high cost of living, which was driven by housing costs, Dr. Wimer said.

“Hearing that New York is back,” he said, “for me, it begs the question: Back for whom?”

New York City became an even more expensive place to live, for both renters and homeowners.

The city has never been a cheap place to own or rent a home — but it’s even more expensive five years after the start of the pandemic.

Nearly 630,000 households spend more than half their income on rent. The median asking price for an apartment was $3,645 per month in February, more than 25 percent higher than at the start of the pandemic. No part of the city is untouched. The steepest increase — nearly 40 percent — has been in the Bronx, long seen as the city’s most affordable borough.

The city’s spending on rental assistance, to help people in homeless shelters find apartments and to provide a lifeline to renters who face eviction, has soared. It is expected to hit $1.1 billion this fiscal year, which started in July. In 2021, the city spent $302 million.

Any solution to the housing affordability crisis, politicians and housing advocates say, must include the construction of housing of all kinds. Last year was a banner year for the building of new units, with nearly 34,000 added, the most since 1965. But it is not enough, and new construction has slowed significantly.

For homeowners, it has never been more expensive to buy in the city. The median sale price was $865,000 in February, a 28 percent increase since early 2020. The median cost to buy in Brooklyn or Manhattan remained about the same: around $1 million.

Companies occupy less space in Manhattan’s office buildings than they did a quarter-century ago.

In the first two decades of the 21st century, the Manhattan skyline was redrawn with towering office buildings to serve the demands of growing companies. That building boom resulted in 419 million square feet of office space, by far the largest office district in the United States.

But companies offloaded offices as the pandemic disrupted the five-day workweek, and they now occupy the lowest amount of space in Manhattan in at least a quarter-century. The percentage of unoccupied space is more than six times higher than in 2000. That glut could fill 32 One World Trade Centers.

Office vacancy in New York City

Source: Cushman & Wakefield Real Estate

The New York Times

Many companies have found they can operate with smaller footprints and with remote workers. White-collar workers in the city now spend about 30 percent of their time working at home, up from a national average of about 7 percent before the pandemic.

Some firms have reversed course. Return-to-office demands, along with an increase in office lease signings in 2024, have led developers and brokers to hope that the market is rebounding.

And yet, in a sign of continuing uncertainty and rising construction costs, the building of new office towers has nearly stopped. No developer has broken ground on the next big property in Manhattan and may not for some time.

Tourism and Entertainment

Tourism collapsed at the start of the pandemic as visitors stayed home.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of tourism to New York City. It sustains numerous industries, employs hundreds of thousands of workers and contributes substantial tax revenue.

Before the pandemic, the city welcomed record numbers of tourists annually and was on track to host 76 million visitors in 2024. The pandemic decimated those projections.

As the city reopened, tourists returned. More than 64 million people visited in 2024, the third most of any year.

There are still fewer international visitors, especially from China, who have historically spent more money in the city and stayed longer than domestic visitors. More than 1.1 million tourists from China traveled to New York City in 2019. It was about half that in 2024.

Visits to many major tourist destinations, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has surpassed that of years before the pandemic. But a few blocks away, the Guggenheim Museum has announced budget cuts in response to lagging attendance. Other attractions, such as Broadway, have rebounded but not fully recovered.

Total attendance at Broadway shows

Sources: Broadway League; Internet Broadway Database

Note: Broadway shows were mostly canceled between March 2020 and September 2021.

The New York Times

Tourists are paying more and more to stay in the city.

The average nightly hotel rate last year in New York City was $314, up 28 percent from 2019. December saw the highest average monthly rate in the city’s history: $440, according to CoStar, a real estate analytics company.

John Fitzgerald, who owns two hotels in Manhattan, said that the last few months of 2024 were the strongest for bookings since the pandemic started. But many travelers, especially those from Europe, where a weakened euro has made visiting the United States more expensive, are groaning about the sticker shock, he said.

“We are still down, but the city is buzzing and our bookings are up, both corporate and leisure,” Mr. Fitzgerald said.

Delivery workers are here to stay.

No other labor force in the city grew and evolved in the last five years quite like delivery workers. Once largely limited to pizza joints and mail couriers, delivery work has become a permanent feature of city life, reshaping the logistics of everything from takeout meals and groceries to retail and prescription drugs.

Since 2019, the number of delivery workers whizzing by on e-bikes and other vehicles has roughly doubled to 60,000, according to James Parrott, a senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs.

The rapid growth of the sector, much of it spurred by recent immigrants, gave workers leverage to push for better pay. In late 2023, after months of resistance from delivery app companies, the minimum hourly wage for food-delivery drivers was set to just under $18, not including tips. This year, it will rise to over $21, exceeding the citywide minimum of $16.50. (The pay is based on the time the workers are actively making deliveries.)

Despite companies’ protests that higher pay would hurt the industry, deliveries have continued to grow. In the third quarter of 2024, 2.54 million food deliveries were made per week, a 1 percent increase from the same period the previous year, according to the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

A big shift in retail means the city looks less like a mall.

Many critics have long lamented an ever-growing number of big-box retail stores in New York City that evoke the feel of a suburban mall.

The economics that supported many of them were already shifting before the pandemic, but remote work and a surge in online shopping have wiped out hundreds of stores from the biggest companies.

There were 1,225 fewer chain stores in New York City in November 2024 than there were in late 2019, a drop of more than 15 percent, according to Jonathan Bowles, the executive director of the Center for an Urban Future.

From 2020 through the third quarter of 2024, nearly every category of store in the city — from apparel and electronics to furniture and beauty products — had more closures than openings, according to the Department of City Planning.

For a brief period, illicit smoke shops flooded many retail corridors, but a city crackdown on unlicensed businesses has forced many of them to close.

And the storefront economy made a comeback, thanks to restaurants.

The city’s storefront economy is reliant, perhaps more than ever, on food and drink.

When nearly every other type of storefront business suffered, it was restaurants that helped drive down vacancies citywide. From 2000 to 2023, the number of restaurants in the city nearly doubled, climbing to over 21,170.

While Manhattan had the most restaurants overall, over 9,400, the recent growth was strongest in the other boroughs, in neighborhoods where residents’ changing work schedules meant they were spending more time outside the city’s central business districts.

Korean fried chicken shops, Taiwanese bubble tea cafes and Greek lunch spots are among the franchises gaining traction, as some fast-food stalwarts and pharmacies shrank their footprints.

The range of cuisines is a reflection of the city’s reliance on a largely immigrant work force, Mr. Bowles said, adding that foreign-born people make up about 57 percent of the restaurant work force in New York.

There is already concern that the Trump administration’s plan to deport millions of immigrants could have a chilling effect on the city’s growing but fragile restaurant scene.

“It is not an overstatement that we are going to be seeing real labor shortages at employers across the city,” Mr. Bowles said.

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New York

How a Writer and Literary Agent Lives on $48,000 in Riverdale

Published

2 hours ago

May 11, 2026

Press Room

How a Writer and Literary Agent Lives on ,000 in Riverdale

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

Ask Lori Perkins what was the biggest bargain she ever scored and her life story comes pouring out. The Advanced Placement classes she took at a public high school, Bronx Science, helped her do four years of N.Y.U. in three. She bought her first apartment with money from a buyout she negotiated with a landlord. Got a break on her wedding from a hotel banquet director who was about to retire and a deal on her divorce for landing her lawyer a book contract.

“Every big thing in my life has been a bargain,” Ms. Perkins said last month as she stood in her apartment high above the Hudson River surrounded by the fruits of a lifetime of haggling.

The Herman Miller Noguchi glass coffee table? An invisibly chipped floor model for $700. To save the $700 delivery fee, she and a friend drove up to Westchester, wrapped it in a blanket and rolled it home “like Lucy and Ethel through the hallway.” The fox fur coat hanging over the chair? $20 new at a vintage shop. “When I looked it up, it was a $575 coat.”

The co-op apartment itself — three bedrooms on the 18th floor of a building on a hilltop in Riverdale in the Bronx — was a foreclosure special: $125,000 in 1992.

It is the apartment of someone who has lived — who is living — a full existence. A sign on the bright orange wall in the kitchen says “A clean house is the sign of a wasted life.” Shelves in every room groan beneath the weight of thousands of books.

Setbacks and Silver Linings

As a literary agent, Ms. Perkins, 66, has sold some 3,000 titles, including seven best-sellers — perhaps you’ve read Jenna Jameson’s memoir “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” She runs a publishing house, Riverdale Avenue Books, specializing in L.G.B.T.Q. erotica. She edited the zombie bodice-ripper anthology “Hungry for Your Love” and has written or co-written nine books herself, including a pair of paperbacks, “Two Dukes and a Lady” and “Two Dukes Are Better Than One,” that birthed a hybrid genre she calls “duke ménage.”

In the last few years, she’s endured some setbacks, but each one has had a silver lining. Burning through her 401(k) — over $100,000 — to pay for her late mother’s dementia care let Ms. Perkins qualify for Medicaid so that when she got breast cancer early in the pandemic all her expenses were covered. Her treatment at Mount Sinai led her to teach journaling to breast cancer survivors, which led to a grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts to teach at her local senior center, where she has discovered a whole community.

The aftereffects of cancer, coupled with a plunge in her publishing house’s overseas sales, which she attributes to Trump-fueled anti-American sentiment, forced her to downshift a couple of gears, take more time to enjoy things and embrace frugality as a lifestyle.

Here’s the state of her hustle, 2026: She’s getting $22,000 from Social Security, about $20,000 as an agent, a couple thousand for freelance writing and, hopefully, another couple for running writing workshops. She signs up for focus groups, “usually about being old,” and will squeeze about $1,000 out of that. And she has lined up a 10-day, $3,000 gig as a Board of Elections poll worker. All told, she’s looking at little under $50,000.

How to Afford the Day-to-Day

On the spending side, the monthly maintenance on her apartment is $2,000, though she’s looking to downsize and move to a lower floor, which she figures could cut her cost in half. “Somebody can call me and buy my apartment right now.” $750,000!

The maintenance includes use of the complex’s outdoor pool, but she rents a cabana with an umbrella for $500 a year “because I can’t go in the sun, after radiation,” she said.

Insurance on her aging Volkswagen Beetle is $1,900 a year. Her annual pilgrimage to Maine costs about $1,200. Most of the rest is day-to-day stuff. Groceries are maybe $200 a month. “I go to Stew Leonard’s where they have dollar beers,” she said.

She allots $250 a month for entertainment, including meals out. She gets the $10 lunch special to go at the local Chinese restaurant and heats it up for dinner. She never misses Restaurant Week.

She does $5 movie Tuesdays at the Showcase Cinema in Yonkers, $4.50 for Broadway tickets through Club Free Time, an online publication. She re-ups her Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions on Black Friday, when they’re $1.99 or $2.99 a month. She’s going to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden on Saturday and the tickets were $130, “so that’s most of my budget for May, but it’s worth it.”

What about museums? Dollar admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters for city residents, free Fridays at the Whitney, pay-what-you wish hours at the Guggenheim. “I used to be a member of all of them, and if I ever had more money I would go back to being a member, but right now I’m taking advantage of their generosity,” Ms. Perkins said.

Her wardrobe budget is minimalist like her fashion. “If it’s winter, I’m wearing black pants and a black shirt. And if it’s summer, I’m wearing a black dress.”

Even her splurges have been bargains. The cruise she took in Italy, using money she had saved by taking the toll-free Broadway Bridge instead of the Henry Hudson Bridge when she drove to Manhattan, was effectively free after she won $1,000 gambling on board.

The Middle Class Fantasy

“I really believe you can do almost anything if you research and plan,” Ms. Perkins said. “It’s the spontaneity that’s hard. And we as Americans are really spoiled.”

Looking back on her journey, Ms. Perkins has reached some conclusions that surprised her.

“Cancer saved my life,” she said. “The life that I was leading was exhausting because I was trying so hard to keep up with this fantasy of middle-classness.”

Now, she said, “I don’t care if I’m wearing last year’s shoes, I don’t need to go out every night to a Michelin-starred restaurant, because I go two times a year, and you know what, when you save up for it, it’s more joyful. Every single thing. Every little joy is a bigger joy. I can’t explain it. I took so much for granted when I had more money.”

Did she mention she’s working on another book?

“It’s called ‘La Vida Broka: How to Live Richly When You’re Dirt Poor,’” Ms. Perkins said. “Just buy the book, because it’s all going to be in there.”

We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.

New York

Maya Lin Connects Nature to a New Manhattan Skyscraper and Beyond

Published

14 hours ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

Maya Lin Connects Nature to a New Manhattan Skyscraper and Beyond

On a recent spring afternoon, the renowned artist and designer Maya Lin clambered up and down a rocky outcropping in Central Park in New York, undeterred by the crowd of tourists that was shooting photos nearby.

While they snapped selfies, she reflected on how this place — and similar geology near her childhood home in Athens, Ohio — had inspired her latest creation: the stone facade on the western walls of the 60-story JPMorgan Chase skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. Estimated to have cost from $3 billion to $4 billion, and with glowing artwork at the summit visible citywide, it opened last fall and occupies the block between 47th and 48th Streets and Madison and Park Avenues.

Her project, “A Parallel Nature,” is a sculpture composed of two 59-foot-tall and 55-foot-wide gray stone walls set in an intricate design, with plants that peek out from the crevices. An array of flowers has been newly planted on the walls this spring.

Lin’s long career and passion for the environment made her a natural choice for the project.

Now 66, she began her career as a 21-year-old senior at Yale University when she won a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Among her many recent projects is the water fountain installation titled “Seeing Through the Universe” for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, set to open to the public next month.

Five of Lin’s works will also be on view at Pace Gallery’s booth at Frieze New York this week. There are pieces that call attention to bodies of water that are disappearing or that have already disappeared — Lake Chad in North Africa and the Aral Sea in Central Asia — along with a piece focused on the Antarctic Circle, and a new silver sculpture, “Silver Yellowstone,” that is inspired by the Yellowstone River, widely considered to be the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states.

In a recent series of interviews in her home office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the JPMorgan Chase building and during the ramble through the rocky terrain near the lower eastern end of Central Park known as the “Dene,” a British term for a valley, Lin described the woods and rock cliffs she remembered from growing up in Ohio.

“Water would just subtly drip down the cliffs, and there would be ferns and grasses and things growing there,” she explained, adding, “I was definitely out there in nature almost daily, and very concerned about environmental issues.”

Central Park, which Lin explores regularly when she is in Manhattan, was its own inspiration. Her family also has a home in southwestern Colorado, where she hikes and bikes every summer.

In 2022, she and representatives of JPMorgan Chase and Tishman Speyer, the development manager of the new skyscraper, took a daylong walk through the park, looking for a rock formation that could serve as the model for “A Parallel Nature” and “bring a little bit of the character” of the park to the building, Lin said.

They initially failed to identify anything appropriate. Lin returned the next morning on her own and came across the Dene, which she had seen on previous walks through the park.

“When I first got a call to look at the building site, I realized that the subway would be running underneath it,” Lin explained. “And I saw an excavation photo of Grand Central Station that showed that its construction cut through Manhattan’s bedrock. And I just had an idea, ‘What if I could bring bedrock to the surface in the middle of Manhattan?’”

“What I am interested in is, quite literally, grounding you in what might be right below your feet that you might not be aware of,” she added.

Capturing the Dene on the exterior wall of the skyscraper, Lin explained, would enable her to express the character of an exposed stone outcropping in Manhattan, quite literally bringing bedrock to the surface, in a way that echoes the Dene in Central Park.

Lin identified a type of gray granite from Barre, Vt., for “A Parallel Nature” that she called a perfect match with the metamorphic rock known as gneissic schist on which the JPMorgan Chase skyscraper sits.

The 239 stone pieces mounted atop the artwork’s two walls were cut by the Quarra Stone Company, a Wisconsin-based stone fabricator that transported the stone on large, flatbed trucks from Vermont to Wisconsin and then to Manhattan. Lin called the installation of the walls on the facade of the skyscraper her most difficult commission yet.

“Trying to create something that would be a balance between natural and man-made was the aesthetic challenge,” she explained. “And to keep the artwork as a sculptural creation rather than an architectonic solution — also the engineering to fabricate and install — were intricate and extremely complex.”

The stonework on each wall is composed of over 100 pieces of granite, Lin said, “so by grouping 15 to 20 pieces together and ever so slightly tilting them, I was able to create larger groupings to help create what I call city states. These helped make each wall feel like it was comprised of larger plates.”

Each of the pieces is hung, in a puzzle-like formation, from a steel bracket system installed on a steel ladder frame system anchored to the concrete support wall on the lowest level of the building’s Madison Avenue facade.

At the foot of each wall is a streambed with waterworn rocks that came from near the headquarters of the Wisconsin fabricator, chosen to work well with the gray granite walls. Water gently flows in the beds, creating a burbling stream in the middle of Midtown traffic cacophony. Lin calls the stream “an unexpected natural moment in the busy city.”

There are also two sources of water on the walls themselves, meant to irrigate the plantings in the walls’ seams. One is a drip irrigation line installed behind what Lin calls “plant pockets,” holes 10 to 12 inches deep that range in length from 3 to 7 feet and that are designed to hold the artwork’s vegetation.

The second is a drip irrigation system that runs along the top of the rock walls. This gently drips continuous streams of water that find their way down and beneath the surface of the rock, nourishing the plantings in the crevices and ledges. The system is designed to encourage plant growth and to bring the sound of trickling water to the facade.

Lin is working with specialists on the plantings, including Blondie’s Treehouse, a Manhattan plant installer and supplier; Cecil Howell, a Brooklyn-based landscape architect who has worked with Lin on a number of recent environmental art installations; and Richard Hayden, the project’s consulting horticulturist, who is also the senior director of horticulture for the High Line, a public park built on a historic elevated rail line on Manhattan’s west side.

Though some plants were installed in late October, it was understood that since water would not be available until late fall, spring would be the ideal time for fresh planting.

Urban environments are tough on plants, Lin explained, calling the site’s horticulture “an experiment.” The horticulture team is trying more than 30 varieties of plants to see which ones thrive where, she said, adding that she expected the plants to be monitored and plantings adjusted quarterly.

Lin said she wanted “to create a predominantly native New York landscape reminiscent of what you might find naturally growing on rocks and within crevices in actual rock faces and ledges” to make visitors aware of the nature around them.

New plants growing this spring include maidenhair fern, Eastern red columbine, creeping phlox, Christmas fern and dwarf crested iris.

Just across from each of the artwork’s walls are a flower garden and native red maple trees, as well as long, sinuous concrete benches designed by Norman Foster, the skyscraper’s architect, all meant to create a sort of public park.

“A Parallel Nature,” as its name implies, “neither tries to perfectly recreate nature, nor feel architecturally fabricated,” Lin explained. “It is a work that makes ambiguous the line between the natural and the man-made.”

The sculpture is one of five works of public art commissioned for the new building by JPMorgan Chase — whose art collection was founded in 1959 by David Rockefeller, then executive vice president and vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. The skyscraper’s other new works include that LED light work at the summit by Leo Villareal, whose art will also be on view at the Pace Gallery exhibit at Frieze; two paintings by Gerhard Richter in the building’s lobby; a 3-D printed, bronze column by Foster, also in the lobby; and a display of light and motion at the lobby’s elevator banks, driven by custom A.I. models by the Turkish artist Refik Anadol.

David Arena, head of global real estate for JPMorgan Chase, said the bank had deliberately lifted up both the Madison Avenue and Park Avenue bases of the new building 85 feet to create more outdoor space for pedestrians. “When passers-by step on the Madison Avenue curb,” he said, “they are awe-struck, think differently, have a moment of respite.”

“We thought it would be a great spot to make a gift to Manhattan and to people in the neighborhood who can come up, have a seat, enjoy a cup of coffee, enjoy some great art, maybe think differently,” he said.”

He also called Lin “one of the most accomplished modern-day artists, a strong enough talent to be a counterpoint to Norman Foster.”

Lin agrees with Arena’s predictions about the artwork. “Even though it can dialogue with the building in scale, it adds an unexpected, natural respite from the busy street life, offering a different feeling,” she said.

New York

‘She Studied Us for a Moment With Theatrical Longing’

Published

1 day ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

‘She Studied Us for a Moment With Theatrical Longing’

Under Cover

Dear Diary:

On a false-spring afternoon, my boyfriend, Luis, and I went to the wine bar around the corner from my Williamsburg apartment. We were sitting at the bar having a private conversation when I asked Luis for the time.

“It’s 7:30,” a blonde woman beside us said before he could answer.

She turned toward us with the bright, urgent expression of someone who had already decided we were all having a drink together. She was drunk, her mascara intact, but only just.

“What do you guys do?” she asked.

I told her I was a first-year teacher in Queens. Luis said he would be graduating in the spring and was looking for a job in marketing.

She studied us for a moment with theatrical longing, and then she leaned in so far that her shoulder nearly touched mine.

“I have a secret,” she said, beaming. “You can’t tell anyone.”

We promised.

She glanced toward the open windows, then back at us.

“I have my second interview with the C.I.A. tomorrow,” she whispered.

Luis and I looked at each other.

“If anyone asks,” she added, “tell them I’m interviewing with the Culinary Institute of America.”

A few minutes later, we paid our check, wished her luck and promised not to tell a soul.

— David Reyes-Mastroianni

Moon Over Manhattan

Dear Diary:

I was walking out of Central Park on a cold February evening when a woman who couldn’t have been five feet tall approached me.

“Have you seen the moon?” she asked.

I tried to brush her off, but she repeated herself.

I turned to see the most brilliant full moon shining above the park. It stopped me in my tracks on a day when I had been in constant motion.

I turned to thank the woman, but she was gone. It was as if the moon herself had come down to demand attention and had left as soon as attention was paid.

— Rebecca Falcon

Wrapped Up

Dear Diary:

Late one night after I moved to Manhattan from the rural South in 1989, I was riding the No. 6 train home from my job at Mortimer’s when I sat down across from what appeared to be a man completely wrapped in a sheet and lying across several seats.

He was wrapped so tightly that there seemed to be no way he could have done it himself.

I couldn’t discern any movement. Not a breath. Not a sound. Did he need help? Was he dead? Was this performance art? What should I do?

No one else seemed to be paying any attention, but my agitation must have been visible, because finally, an impeccably dressed older woman wearing white gloves and a hat with a lace veil leaned toward me.

“I don’t think he wants to be disturbed,” she said.

— Brian McMaster

Pretty Peaches

Dear Diary:

I was walking down 79th Street when I heard a woman with a large, coral-colored cockatoo on her shoulder say: “Excuse me. Can you hold my bird?”

I looked around. Was she talking to me?

She huffed at my two seconds of confusion.

“Just put your arm out!” she said.

I did, and while this woman answered her phone, her imposing bird with claws as big as my hands hopped onto my wrist, then sidled up my arm and onto my shoulder.

She was heavier than I expected. Not quite like having a dog on my shoulder, but maybe a cat.

I wanted to look at her. It’s not every day you have a large bird sitting on you, but I was afraid that if I did, she might gouge out my eyeballs with her imposing beak.

I decided to fix my eyes on a nearby street sign and hope for the best. The bird told me her name was Peaches, that she was 7 years old and also that she was pretty.

My first thought was: Well, aren’t we a little full of ourselves? But then I caught myself. Good for you, Peaches, I thought. I wish I had your confidence.

I told Peaches I had an appointment and hoped her owner would get off the phone soon.

Then Peaches gripped my shoulder a little tighter with her claws and stretched the top of her body up and over my head so that I was wearing her like a pair of earmuffs.

“I love you,” she said.

We stayed in this magical bird hug for a minute or two before her owner whisked her off my shoulder with a halfhearted “Thanks” and hurried away.

Peaches turned her head 180 degrees, seemed to look at me longingly and disappeared into the day.

— Eileen Kelly