'I Just Hope This Thing Ends Soon so I Can Go Back to Hating Andrew Cuomo Again.'

Published April 2, 2020 in

JACKSON HEIGHTS, QUEENS—The first thing you notice are the sirens, which are everywhere, suddenly, echoing through the streets. In the western half of Queens, this neighborhood of stately 1920’s co-ops and populated primarily by immigrants from all over the world, is known as the most diverse neighborhood on the planet. One-hundred and seventy-six languages are spoken here, its streets in ordinary times resembling some kind of bustling international bazaar.

Now it is mostly empty, the shops and restaurants closed, the sidewalks deserted but littered with discarded hospital masks and gloves, the overhead train rumbling along half-filled. The space is filled by the sound of sirens bouncing off the walls. There’s no other activity to drown them out.

All of New York City is now a coronavirus hot zone, but no neighborhood saw as many people head to the ER as this one. Elmhurst Hospital, which faced what one doctor called an “apocalyptic” surge at the beginning of this crisis, with 13 deaths in 24 hours, is four blocks away from my apartment. For weeks, people have been lined up around in front of it, standing behind metal barriers that snake up and down the street, hoping to get tested for the disease.

The impact of the virus crept along slowly—first Broadway was closed, then colleges, then museums and then schools, and then, finally, everything. There is always a faint air of danger in New York, a sense that things can come undone at any moment, and everyone in the back of their mind has a plan for what to do when the dirty bomb lands in Times Square, or the rivers rise and wash the whole city away. Where will we meet up? Where will we flee? But not this time. There was nowhere to go. No one wanted us, rightfully suspicious that we carried the virus with us.

New York is always on the move, but for now, New Yorkers are stuck.

Without shops, bars, restaurants, theaters, museums, galleries, office buildings, parks, the city has turned into a cluster of tight, airless apartments, stacked one on top of the other. Once New York turned in on itself, everybody piled on to various text and WhatsApp chains. Updates and warnings and worry come through at all hours. A person who lives above me is coughing at all hours of the night, and I am scared for my family. People who can are escaping to friends and families’ homes elsewhere. “I’ll be one less ventilator needed should it come to that,” says one friend who fled.

We trade tips on what to do with kids who are stuck home all day, how to wash laundry, since our building’s laundromats seem infected. But honestly everything seems infected. Elevator buttons. Hand railings. Fences. The wind itself feels thick and fetid, carrying along unseen pathogens.

How upside down is life in New York? For starters, Andrew Cuomo, our combative governor of a decade, suddenly seems likeable. He’s beloved in some corners that, a few weeks ago, hated him.

It could be argued that other governors, like Jay Inslee of Washington or Gavin Newsom of California or even Mike DeWine of Ohio, were better prepared and recognized the threat of coronavirus more quickly. But Cuomo is the one who has become President Donald Trump’s moral counterweight. When Trump used the word “hoax,” Cuomo pushed through a law that granted him emergency powers to handle the coming storm. When Trump said it would end by Easter, Cuomo unveiled charts and graphs preparing people for a long slog ahead.

Cuomo’s daily news conferences have become appointment viewing, with the governor in the middle of the dais in the state capitol’s stately Red Room, surrounded by American flags and his closest advisers, who mostly stay silent except to pass him notes. His deep Queens baritone insists on fact and data to combat the spread of the disease. He can be hokey, trotting out his college-age daughters to explain, with eyes rolled up into the backs of their heads, how much more they prefer being home in Albany to their now canceled Spring Break plans, or titling one of the slides on his many PowerPoints “personal opinion.” He talks about his mother, about how you don’t sacrifice a single human life on the altar of the stock market, after Trump said that the cure can’t be worse than the disease.

The governor also has turned himself into a national figure, outflanking Trump on the leadership front, and giving him a run for his money on political agility as well, lambasting the federal response one minute, praising the sudden shipment of supplies the next, putting on a master class in how to project calm and confidence in the face of a disaster. His briefings are, as one TV critic put it, the best thing on TV these days, picked up by cable networks and covered by reporters from around the world.

It is disorienting. Among liberal elites in New York City, Cuomo has always been loathed, a relationship made worse by the fact that he seemed to welcome, and even delight in, the hatred of the Twitterati of his own party. He was seen as the person who went to war with the progressive Working Families Party, who made deals with Republicans, who rallied the party’s centrist establishment against the activist class that dominates the city. In 2018, he won a third term in a landslide against liberal challenger Cynthia Nixon, a star of “Sex and the City,” who despite almost no institutional support still won in parts of Lower Manhattan, brownstone Brooklyn, and the parts of Queens most affected now by coronavirus.

Among this set of New Yorkers, it is customary now to explain one’s position before lavishing praise on him. “I am a teacher, so I will never forgive him, but …” or “I voted for Cynthia Nixon, but …”

I was in Albany just as the crisis was unfolding, and sitting in the governor’s office, when a friend, a TV writer, texted me: “I just hope this thing ends soon so I can go back to hating Andrew Cuomo again.”

Cuomo has been in the city more often than usual. Every time, it is to herald something that would have been impossible even a few weeks ago. A hospital ship arriving in New York harbor. The Javits Center, the place where Hillary Clinton was supposed to crack the highest and hardest glass ceiling on election night 2016, turned into a makeshift field hospital. A group led by Franklin Graham is setting up a tent hospital in Central Park, turning New York’s backyard into something that, if only it were sepia-toned, would look like it was something out of the Civil War.

(Still, some rivalries never change: Cuomo still seems to relish the chance to bigfoot any ideas that that come from his bête noire, Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom the governor has always viewed as an annoyance.)

All of this comes as the native New Yorker in the White House has largely left the city to its own devices. Trump was always something of a third-rate figure here, just another graceless striver for eyeballs in the attention economy. There are great New York real estate families, the Rudins and Dursts and Tishmans, and they go about their business quietly, serve on the board of the Association for a Better New York, and have far more sway over the city’s politics than any politician. Trump was never a part of that group, not even close. He worked in the margins of the law and zoning regulations, projects that would fire up neighborhood activists but were never substantial enough to raise the ire of government, at least not in the quarter-century before he became president. New York’s Republican Party, full of establishment-type political operatives and donor types who rallied around the candidacies of George Pataki and Mike Bloomberg and Rudy Giuliani, shunned him just as much as the national party did until he finally steamrolled his way to the nomination.

He was always entertaining, in a dancing-bear kind of way, but if you lived in New York, you never thought anyone could ever really be fooled by the show. This is only adds to New Yorkers’ perplexity, as Trump feints and bobs through his nightly news conferences, far less artfully than our own governor. The American people actually rejected Rudy Giuliani in 2008, back when there was still a halo of 9/11 around his leadership. How could this be the New Yorker they chose?

As bad as these past few weeks have been, everything we are told is that the coming weeks are going to be so much worse. We are dangerously low on hospital beds, masks, ventilators and doctors. Arthur Ashe Stadium, the Queens landmark that hosts the the U.S. Open, has been converted to overflow hospital space. Nurses warn of a critical lack of gear. There are stacks of body bags now in supply closets at area hospitals, waiting for use. Hospitals are using forklifts to transfer corpses to refrigerated trucks parked outside.

Many people I know have scarcely left the house at all. Everything is closed except for a few restaurants, which have taped hand-written cardboard signs in their windows, advertising that they are open for delivery, for takeout, for anything really. They look like the “Save Me” signs of people on a raft, being carried away by a flood. One by one, the signs are coming down, the restaurateurs having given up. The $1,200 that Congress delivered to most Americans isn’t going to cover more than a few weeks of rent for most New York one-bedroom apartments.

A saxophonist I know moved to New York from her native Scotland after grabbing all the awards a young musician could win over there, coming here to ply her trade in the clubs and teach on the side. She has since left, moved back overseas, and it is hard to imagine what would bring her, or anyone else back here.

And this was always the deal: You came here because everyone was here. They aren’t all interesting or fabulous or famous or gritty, but a lot of them are, and they all chose to be here even though it would easier, simpler, roomier and cheaper to live someplace else. And without them, what is left? Just a bunch of big buildings and small apartments, the same city, but without its strivers—a place, at last, like anywhere else.

New York has withstood disasters before: 9/11, the financial crash, Hurricane Sandy, the Knicks. But those disasters were limited in geography and in scope. Huge swaths of New York and of its people were unaffected by them. Coronavirus will touch every corner of New York City life, and in time, every corner of American life. There will be nowhere to turn to for help, since what started here will soon spread out there.

There were 48 cases in New York City on the day the city started shuttering. Forty-eight. That’s .0005 percent of the city’s population. It would only half-fill a subway car. Today there are more than 47,000, up 4,000 from just yesterday, and 9,000 from the day before that. When could the city possibly cross the 48-case threshold again, from the other direction? And who would want to live here until it does? To live in New York is to live on top of another, to constantly be jostling for space, whether it is lining up to fight the big building going up that would block out your light and air, or the armrest at a movie theater. It is hard to imagine a time when it will be safe to live like that again. And even if it were, what would be here to come home to?

No one should have any nostalgia for the city of the 1970s and ’80s, a place that teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and romanticized danger. Especially not now, now that the danger is again so close at hand. But at the same time, New York in this century may have grown too comfortable with itself. John Updike’s line that the true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding, embodies a smugness that makes you want to smack anyone who thinks it. Yet many surely do. Over the past two decades the paradigmatic New York moment has to be Carrie Bradshaw’s self-contained sigh.

That New York is dead now, too. By the end of this, the city’s sense of terminal uniqueness may have to come to an end. At some point New York will stop dealing with its horrific death toll and have to deal with its now staggering budget deficit, the fact that the businesses that snatched office space in downtown can now just have employees who work from home, the fact that many New Yorkers have fled elsewhere, and that there is much less of a city here to lure them back. It is a hole unlike any the city has ever had to dig itself out of.

I wish I could say that the New York we knew will return soon, that the people who post their phone numbers on telephone poles and invite their neighbors to call if they need food or medicine delivered or the peple who go to their balconies to cheer health care workers every day at 7 p.m. show the spirit and resiliency of the city, and that, like after 9/11, we will build back better than before, but I can’t right now. One day, perhaps, but now. It is impossible to look on New York and not despair.

It was just two weeks ago that New York was still New York. It was a Friday in mid-March. It was unseasonably warm, and the light from an early spring sun bathed the whole neighborhood in orange. That day, Mayor Bill de Blasio had said, “We want people still to go on about their lives. We want people to rest assured that a lot is being done to protect them.”

A bunch of us, my neighbors, gathered in the courtyards of one of the old co-ops that line neighborhood blocks, walling off the outside world. The kids ran around while we drank beer and talked about how surreal this all seemed, like we all had collectively stepped into a different universe without looking where we were going. Everything was shuttering: theaters, museums, sports, street fairs, parades.

But everything seemed fine somehow, too. There were over 100 confirmed cases, but no deaths yet. All the kids’ after-school activities had been cancelled, but not their schools, and they ran around the courtyard as they would any Friday, oblivious to it all, as, in a way, we all were.

We were told to support local businesses, and everybody rolled out to dinner, half-tipsy from the early evening beer, to some of the restaurants nearby on the avenues. They were full that night, not just in Queens but all over the city—full with my neighbors, parents with kids in my kids’ school, people you make your way in life alongside without quite even knowing it.

That weekend schools closed, and then bars and restaurants were ordered shut, and life crept inside. That was the last time I saw most of those people, and I don’t know when I will see them again.