New York

The Searing Memories of the Pandemic’s Early Days

Published

12 months 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

How a Parks Worker Lives on $37,500 in Tompkinsville, Staten Island

Published

5 days ago

February 28, 2026

Press Room

How a Parks Worker Lives on ,500 in Tompkinsville, Staten Island

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?

Sara Robinson boarded a Greyhound bus from Oregon to New York City to attend Hunter College in the early 2000s, bright-eyed and eager to pick up odd jobs to fuel her dream of living there.

For a long time, she made it work. But recently, that has been more challenging than ever.

Right around her 40th birthday, Ms. Robinson began to feel financially squeezed in Brooklyn, where she had lived for years. Ms. Robinson (no relation to this reporter) was also feeling too grown to live with roommates.

“As a child,” she said, “you don’t think you’re going to have a roommate at 40.” She decided to move into a place of her own: a one-bedroom apartment in the Tompkinsville neighborhood of Staten Island.

After she moved, the preschool where she’d worked for over a decade closed. Now, she works two jobs. She is a seasonal employee for the state Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, working from Tuesday to Saturday. And on Monday nights, she sells concessions at the West Village movie theater Film Forum, which pays $25 an hour plus tips.

Ms. Robinson, now 45, loves her job as an environmental educator at a state park on Staten Island. Her team runs the park’s social media accounts and comes up with event programming, like a recent project tapping maple trees to make syrup.

But the role is temporary. Her last stint was from June 2024 to January 2025. Then she was unemployed until August 2025. Ms. Robinson’s current contract will be up in April, unless she gets an extension or a different parks job opens up.

Ms. Robinson’s biweekly pay stubs from the parks department amount to about $1,300 before taxes. She barely felt a difference, she said, while she was out of work and pocketing around $880 every two weeks from her unemployment checks. (Her previous parks gig paid $1,100 a check.)

Living in New York’s Greenest Borough

“It used to be, ‘There’s no way I’m moving to Staten Island,’” Ms. Robinson said. “But the place is close to the water. I’m three minutes from the ferry. The rest is history.” She lives on the third floor of a multifamily house, above an art studio and another tenant. Her rent is $1,600 a month, plus $125 in utilities, including her phone bill.

“If my situation changes, I don’t know if I could find something similar,” she said. “So much of my New York life has been feeling trapped to an apartment. You get a place for a good price, and you’re like, ‘I can’t leave now.’”

Staten Island is convenient for Ms. Robinson’s parks job, but it’s become harder to justify living in a borough where she knows few people. It takes more than an hour to get to friends in Brooklyn, an especially hard trek during the winter. After four years of living on Staten Island, Ms. Robinson feels somewhat isolated.

“All my friends on Staten Island are senior citizens,” she said. “It’s great. I love it. But I do want friends closer to my age.”

One of Ms. Robinson’s friends, Ray, took her on nature walks and taught her about tree identification, sparking an interest in mycology, the study of mushrooms. This led to a productive — and free — fungi foraging hobby during unemployment. She has found all sorts of mushrooms, including, after a month of searching, the elusive morel.

The Budgeting Game

Ms. Robinson doesn’t update her furniture often, but when she does, she shops stoop sales in Park Slope or other parts of Brooklyn.

“It’s like a treasure hunt,” she said. “You could make a whole apartment off the street, off the stuff that people throw away.”

She also makes a game out of grocery shopping, biking to Sunset Park in Brooklyn or Manhattan’s Chinatown to go to stores where there are better deals. She budgets about $300 for groceries each month.

Ms. Robinson bikes almost everywhere, sometimes traveling a little farther to enter the Staten Island Railway at one of the stations that don’t charge a fare. She spends $80 a month on subway and ferry fares, and $5 a month for a discounted Citi Bike membership she gets through a credit union, though she usually uses her own bike. She is handy and does repairs herself.

There are certain splurges — Ms. Robinson drops $400 once or twice a year on round-trip airfare to Seattle, where her family lives. She also spent $100 last year to see a concert at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens.

She said she has many financial saving graces. She has no student loans and no car to make payments on. She doesn’t get health insurance from her jobs, but she qualifies for Medicaid.

She mostly eats at home, though sometimes friends will treat her to dinner. She repays them with tickets to Film Forum movies.

Nothing Beats the Twinkling Lights

Ms. Robinson’s friends often talk about leaving the city — and the country.

Two friends have their eyes set on Sweden, where they hope to get the affordable child care and social safety net they are struggling to access in New York.

Ms. Robinson can’t see herself moving elsewhere in the United States, but she is entertaining the idea of an international move if she can’t hack it on Staten Island.

Yet the pull of the city is hard for her to resist.

“I just get a rush when I’m riding the Staten Island Ferry across the bay,” she said. “You see all the little twinkling lights. It’s this feeling of, ‘everything is possible here.’”

That feeling, plus the many friendly faces Ms. Robinson sees every day — the ferry operators, the conductors on the Staten Island Railway, her co-workers at Film Forum — are what tie her to New York.

“My savings are not increasing, so there’s that,” she said. “But I’ve been OK so far. I think I’m going to figure it out.”

New York

How the Editor in Chief of Marie Claire Gets Styled for a Trip to Italy

Published

5 days ago

February 27, 2026

Press Room

How the Editor in Chief of Marie Claire Gets Styled for a Trip to Italy

Nikki Ogunnaike, the editor in chief of Marie Claire magazine, did not grow up the scion of an Anna Wintour or a Marc Jacobs.

But, she said, “my mom and dad are both very stylish people.”

They got dressed up to go to church every week in her hometown Springfield, Va. Her mother managed a Staples; her father, a CVS. “Presentation is important to them,” she said.

Since landing her first internship with Glamour magazine in college, Ms. Ogunnaike, 40, has held editorial roles there and at Elle magazine and GQ. She has been in the top post at Marie Claire since 2023.

She recently spent a Saturday with The New York Times as she prepared for Milan Fashion Week.

New York

How a Physical Therapist and a Retiree Live on $208,000 in Harlem

Published

2 weeks ago

February 21, 2026

Press Room

How a Physical Therapist and a Retiree Live on 8,000 in Harlem

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.

It has never really occurred to Marian or Charles Wade to live anywhere but the city where they were born and where they raised their children.

New York is in their bones. “We have our roots here, and our families enjoyed life here before us,” Ms. Wade said.

And they feel lucky. Between Mr. Wade’s pension, earned after more than 40 years as an analyst at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and his Social Security benefits, along with Ms. Wade’s work as a physical therapist at a psychiatric center, they bring in about $208,000 a year.

Still, it’s hard for the couple not to notice how much the city has changed as it has become wealthier.

About 10 years ago, Ms. Wade, 65, and Mr. Wade, 69, sold the Morningside Heights apartment they had lived in for decades. The Manhattan neighborhood had become more affluent, and tensions over how their building should be managed and how much residents should be expected to pay for upkeep boiled over between people who had lived there for years and newer neighbors.

They found a new home in Harlem, large enough to fit their two children, who are now adults struggling to afford the city’s housing market.

All in the Family

Ms. Wade knew it was time to leave Morningside Heights when she spotted her husband hiding behind a bush outside their building, hoping to avoid an unpleasant new neighbor. They had bought their apartment in 1994 for $206,000, using some money they had inherited from their families, and sold it in 2015 for $1.13 million.

The couple found a new apartment in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem for $811,000, and put most of the money down upfront. They took out a loan with a good rate for the remaining cost, and had a $947 monthly payment. They recently finished paying off the mortgage, but they have monthly maintenance payments of $1,555, as well as two temporary assessments to help improve the building, totaling $415 a month.

Their two children each moved home shortly after graduating from college.

The couple’s son, Jacob Wade, 28, split an apartment with three roommates nearby for a while, but spent down his savings and moved back in with his parents. He is searching for an affordable one bedroom nearby and plans to move out later in the year. Their daughter, Elka Wade, 27, came home after college but recently moved to an apartment in Astoria, Queens, with roommates.

Until their daughter moved out a few weeks ago, she and her brother each took a bedroom, and Mr. and Ms. Wade slept in the dining room, which they had converted into their bedroom with the help of a Murphy bed and a new set of curtains for privacy.

There is very little storage space. A piano occupies an entire closet in their son’s bedroom, because the family has no other place to fit it.

The setup is cramped, but close quarters have their benefits: When their daughter, a classically trained cellist, was living there, she often practiced at home in the evenings. “I love listening to her play,” Ms. Wade said.

Three Foodtowns and a Thrift Shop

The Wades do what they can to keep their costs low. They’ve decided against installing new, better insulated windows in their drafty apartment. They don’t go on vacations, instead visiting their small weekend home in rural upstate New York. And they’ve pulled back on takeout food and retail shopping.

Instead, Mr. Wade surveys the three Foodtown supermarkets near their home for the best deals, preferring one for produce and another for meat. The weekly grocery bill has been around $500 with both kids living at home, and the family usually orders delivery twice a week, rotating between Chinese and Indian food, which typically costs $70, including leftovers.

For an occasional splurge, they love Pisticci, a nearby restaurant where the penne with homemade mozzarella costs $21.

The couple owns a car, which they park on the street for free. But they often use public transportation to avoid paying the $9 congestion pricing fee to drive downtown, or when they have a good parking spot they don’t want to give up. They have a senior discount for their transit cards, which allows them to pay $1.50 per subway or bus ride, rather than $3.

Ms. Wade stopped shopping at the stores she used to frequent, like Eileen Fisher and Banana Republic, years ago. Instead, she visits a thrift store called Unique Boutique on the Upper West Side. She was browsing the aisles a few months ago, before a big Thanksgiving dinner, and spotted the perfect dress for the occasion for just $20.

But she has one nonnegotiable weekly expense: a private yoga lesson in an instructor’s apartment nearby, for $150 a session.

Elka Wade, a cellist, often practices at home, to the delight of her parents. Bess Adler for The New York Times

Swapping Mortgage Payments for Singing Lessons

For every member of the Wade family, life in New York is all about the arts.

The children each attended the Special Music School, a public school focused on the arts. Their son, an actor, teacher and director, works part time at the Metropolitan Opera and the Kaufman Music Center, a performing arts complex in Manhattan. His sister works in administration at the Kaufman Center.

Mr. Wade is still close with friends from high school who are now professional musicians, and the couple often goes to see them play at venues like the Bitter End in Greenwich Village, where shows typically have a $12 cover and a two-drink minimum.

The couple has cut back on going to expensive concerts — they used to try to see Elvis Costello every time he came to New York, for example — but have timeworn strategies for getting affordable theater tickets.

They recently splurged on tickets to “Oedipus” on Broadway for themselves and their daughter, who they treated to a ticket as a birthday gift. The seats were in the nosebleed section, but still cost $80 apiece.

The couple has a $75 annual membership to the Film Forum, which gives them reduced price tickets to movies. They occasionally get discounted tickets to the opera through their son’s work, and when they don’t, they pay for family circle passes, which are usually $47 a head, plus a $10 fee.

Ms. Wade, who grew up commuting from Flushing, Queens, to Manhattan to take dance lessons, sometimes takes $20 drop-in ballet classes during the week at the Dance Theater of Harlem, just a few blocks away from the apartment.

Recently, when the couple paid off their mortgage, Ms. Wade celebrated by giving herself a treat: weekly private singing lessons, for $125 a session.