New York
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.
Nearly two decades have passed since “The Wire” ended, yet Jamie Hector’s haunting turn as the drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield still resonates. Jay-Z recently referred to the character during a freestyle at the Roots Picnic.
“I respect the fact that artists find time to appreciate another artist in that way,” Mr. Hector said. “I consider the work that we do at the highest level with great art. His is literary. His is over a track, making you feel, and mine was visual.”
Mr. Hector, 50, also a director, producer and children’s book author, has devoted much of his life to the arts as one of television’s most compelling, understated figures, currently seen in Apple TV’s “Cape Fear.”
He splits his time between his family, dramatic roles, his own projects and shepherding the next generation of artists. Mr. Hector spent a recent blistering Thursday in Brooklyn with The New York Times.
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?
Ryan Compton knows a thing or two about gigs. To make it in New York, he has worked as a retail associate inside the Museum of Modern Art’s gift store, a cashier for a downtown taqueria and a paint mixer for Takashi Murakami. He has experienced the paradox of a city both known for its artists and for pricing artists out.
Financial constraints forced Mr. Compton, who is from South Jersey, to move away from New York twice over the course of two decades. He has lived in Baltimore, Chicago and Philadelphia, but remains convinced the resources and people inside New York are unparalleled.
“You never know who you’re going to run into,” he said. “Everyone’s curious about each other.”
Since moving back in 2022, he has whittled down his source of income to a single gig as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he made $51,000 before taxes last year. It’s his second time at the museum. He first worked there part-time in 2011 before leaving in 2015 to earn his master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“I know I couldn’t afford graduate school and the cost of living in New York at the same time,” he said.
A third try at New York life has forced Mr. Compton, now 46, to confront the sustainability behind a career as both an interdisciplinary artist and a security guard — even inside one of the most famous museums in the world.
Love at First Sight (With New York)
As an undergraduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Mr. Compton looked forward to spending weekends at his friend’s apartment gallery in the East Village in Manhattan.
A combination of showing face and knowing the right person led to his side project at the time — fashioning 3-d printed stuffed animals with skull faces — which were featured in an issue of Vogue Japan. He even sold a few inside a handmade craft store in Tokyo’s Ginza district for about $1,000.
“I was interested in the contrast between fuzzy-shaped animals and skulls,” he said, later adding, “You know, stuff when you’re a 20-something-year-old being kind of edgy.”
The early moment of success propelled Mr. Compton to chase after opportunities to showcase his work. While supporting himself financially through retail and service jobs, he helped write the artist Roman Ondak’s interactive performance piece at MoMA, “Measuring the Universe;” and worked as a collaborator for “No Souls for Sale,” an experimental project temporarily at Dia Chelsea and later, the Tate Modern in London. Both went unpaid.
“The chance to work in modern art before I was 30 is unheard of,” Mr. Compton said. “It only happens in New York.”
A Slower Pace
Tens of thousands of people flock to the Metropolitan on weekends, and it’s Mr. Compton’s job — one he has found increasingly difficult — to make sure the art is untouched. He believes social media has altered the way visitors engage with the museum. Think more selfies and poses leaned against Hellenistic marble.
The one hour work commute from Parkchester in the East Bronx gives him time to prepare for a long day ahead. He splits a two-bedroom with a co-worker for $1,000 a month and pays $50 in utilities. Heat and water are included in his rent, and his roommate covers the cost of Wi-Fi. He pays $90 each month for his phone bill.
The slower pace of the residential neighborhood matches the stage of life he’s in now. In the last few years, Mr. Compton has slowed down as he has come to terms with the expenses behind his art.
He no longer has free access to fabrication laboratories pegged to his university, and he has opted for the more cost-friendly hobbies of zine-making and book binding. He is, however, eyeing a $1,000 3-d printer. For now, he has settled on $20 a month Photoshop subscription.
The largest constraint tempering Mr. Compton’s spending is his $100,000 student loan debt from graduate school. The window for his deferment period closed, and even with some money he inherited after his mother passed, he says he needs a miracle to finish paying off his loans. “I’m not sure what to do anymore,” he said.
Splurging on Plants and Experimental Harsh Noise Records
Mr. Compton may not have any children, but he is a proud “plant dad.”
His apartment houses $1,000 worth of plants sourced through Facebook groups, pop-ups and by following Brooklyn Horticulture online. He typically pays $30-$50 for medium to large sized plants, but he is constantly on the lookout for deals.
When he isn’t at home with his plants, Mr. Compton treks into Manhattan to do his weekly grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s. He prefers the prices there to local spots in the Bronx and estimates he spends $70 each week.
A cash guzzler of Mr. Compton’s food budget is the $20 a day — an additional $80 a week — he spends at the Metropolitan’s staff cafeteria for breakfast and lunch. When working 12 hour shifts, “I’m not gonna go home and make something to bring the next day,” he said.
On his days off, he seeks out affordable food deals. He frequents Vanessa’s Dumplings in Chinatown for their $8 dumpling special.
When in the mood to treat himself, Mr. Compton rides the train a few more stops out to Ridgewood, Queens and Bushwick, Brooklyn, to visit his favorite record stores like Fringe Records and Nexus Records. An experimental harsh noise aficionado, he spends no less than $100 each visit.
His biggest and most recent splurge was a 10-day trip to Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka in Japan in February. He was able to cut his $900 round trip ticket to $700 with credit card points. Add in the cost of hotels, meals and souvenirs, he spent close to $5,000 total.
“I wanted to go because my artwork had been to Japan, but I haven’t been to Japan,” he said.
Looking Ahead
Mr. Compton wants to strike a balance between saving and enjoying the life he dreamed of in New York. To help pay off his loans, he considered applying to be an art handler for the Metropolitan, a job with a slight pay bump. But without his present benefit of overtime pay, he’s afraid he would be making less than he does currently.
Over the years, Mr. Compton has found community among other security guards at the Metropolitan, who, like him, are artists. He has also built inroads with notable names at the museum, one being Sheena Wagstaff, the former chairman of modern and contemporary art, who he said took the time to know Mr. Compton not only as a co-worker, but also as an individual, too.
Because of his connections, he feels like he has nowhere else to go. He considered a quieter lifestyle upstate in Westchester or the Catskills, but believes he will make less money outside of the city. And, of course, he would have to leave the place he’s called home for the majority of his adult years.
“I did four other cities, and they weren’t as good or great as I like New York,” he said. “I always end up here.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
You made it time. If you want to look a little longer, just scroll back up and press “Continue.”
Look up.
Before you commute home to suburbs like Tarrytown and Larchmont, or race toward the next stop on your tourist map, take a minute.
Look up to see the stars.
One hundred and twenty-five feet above you are 2,500 stars and six signs of the zodiac along the ecliptic, a line that represents the path of the sun across the sky:
The signs are joined by a few others: Orion, Pegasus, Triangulum and, in the center of it all, Musca Borealis (the Northern fly, or sometimes called Apis, the bee). The Milky Way streaks across the ceiling in the opposite direction. The whole thing is ringed by intricate plaster moldings along the clerestory windows. Fifty-nine of the stars twinkle.
Who says there isn’t magic in Midtown?
The original early 1900s plan for the ceiling was to build a massive skylight so commuters could look up at the actual stars:
But time and money were short, so the architects asked the artist Paul Helleu to design a version of the sky on the ceiling instead. Helleu took inspiration from star atlases from the 1600s. His main resource was the Uranometria from 1603, a lushly illustrated volume that was the first detailed cataloging of individual stars, their positions and brightness. See how similar the figures are. This is Aries:
Here’s Taurus, the bull:
A heart balloon — one of several — had floated up the day we took this photograph, nestling between Orion’s club and Taurus’s horn (maybe an earthly sign that this heavenly hunt might finally resolve).
Converting the flat drawings of a spherical sky re-projected onto a semi-cylindrical vaulted ceiling would have been no easy task. The design work was done by a famous scenic designer and muralist, James Monroe Hewlett, and was overseen by the Columbia astronomy professor Harold Jacoby, who in 1910 assured a panicked public that Halley’s comet would not hit Earth.
Dozens of painters got to work. The terminal opened at midnight on Feb. 2, 1913. The New York Central Railroad boasted “that many school children will go to the Grand Central Terminal to study this representation of the heavens.”
Two weeks later, a commuter from New Rochelle (and a hobby astronomer) looked up at the ceiling and realized that west was east and east was west and the sky was not, actually, in a proper arrangement. Only Orion was shown in the “correct” orientation. He wrote a “wrathful” letter to the station. As The New York Times reported in 1913, officials at Grand Central “did not deny the charge that things were a bit mixed, but held that it was a pretty good ceiling for all that.”
How this happened is still a matter of debate, given Professor Jacoby’s astronomical blessing.
Michael Allison, a former NASA planetary scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and a former adjunct in the Columbia astronomy and astrophysics department), met me last month at the great clock under the ceiling to explain his theory.
“I’ve stared at the ceiling I don’t know how many hours,” he said. “I keep hoping I can discover one more thing.”
The liberties taken, Mr. Allison said, like re-sizing the constellations to fit the space and flipping Orion (in relation to the rest), were carefully done. Ultimately, a good marriage of art and science. He thinks Jacoby was a victim of big project bureaucracy, that it was all a mixup.
Jacoby probably expected the design he approved to be projected overhead, where the result would match the plans if you held them above you. The painters put them on the floor instead. Hence, the flip.
But this “heavenly view” — the stars as if they could be seen from above, looking down — may not be a bad view at all.
“There are just so many bad things happening in the world now that I think the sky offers a perspective that can lift us above that,” Mr. Allison said.
For Deirdre Newman, the great-granddaughter of the muralist Hewlett, who painted the ceiling, the imperfection “is what art is.”
Ms. Newman, it turns out, is also a painter of murals and ceilings. But these days, if she has to flip an image, she just hits a button on the projector.
“Anytime I make a mistake painting, I’m like, this proves that it’s art,” she said. “It is not perfection, and it shouldn’t be — it would be a sad thing if it was.”
The stories that we’ve given to the stars over millenniums, some of the most retold tales in history, are hardly orderly — stories of fate, violence, betrayal, revenge, sex and punishment. Cancer helps Hera in pinching a rival’s foot. Orion, son of Poseidon, is placed in the stars by Zeus, locked in an eternal hunt. The two fish of Pisces (Aphrodite and Eros) are linked together to escape the monster-of-all-monsters, Typhon.
Or the stories are totally different if you were Babylonian or Egyptian, Greek or Roman. Today, the stars mean something else again to a devoted user of the horoscope app Co-Star, seeking reassurance after a breakup. And to a commuter standing in Grand Central, looking up while waiting for the train, the stars might just be a momentary diversion, a decorative way to pass the time. Or more.
Take what you want. Take what you need.
***
By the 1940s, the ceiling had fallen into disrepair, so they painted a whole new one on four-foot-by-eight-foot asbestos sheets over the old one. This is the version that exists today. Eventually that second ceiling, too, grew dark with grime and had to be cleaned from 1996 to 1998. The difference was stark. As you were zooming in, you may have noticed a little dark square by Cancer. They deliberately left one bit of the uncleaned ceiling here:
The best time to take all of it in — the ceiling, and the majesty of the station — might just be coming this weekend. The setting sun will line up with Manhattan’s street grid and should (pending clouds) bathe the terminal in a beautiful golden glow Saturday at 8:19 p.m. and Sunday at 8:20 p.m. I plan to be on the east balcony looking west on Sunday for that moment.
See you there.
How we took the photograph
To generate a high-resolution panorama of the ceiling, The Times captured 232 close-up images. We then used software to stitch these photos into an equirectangular projection, to approximate the curve of the ceiling. We also developed custom computer vision software to ensure consistent color blending across varying lighting conditions. To optimize for display efficiency and clarity during navigation, the image was then re-projected into the shape of a cube. We think it’s still a pretty good picture for all that.
This is an installment in our series of experiments on art and attention. If you liked this one, you may like these past exercises: a finished, unfinished portrait; a sudden rain over a bridge; a unicorn tapestry; some buckets from Home Depot; and a Whistler painting.
Sign up to be notified when new installments are published here. And let us know how this exercise made you feel in the comments.
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