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.