6
Opening Up, Summer and Fall 2020
As May 2020 drew to a close, and the number of deaths from COVID-19 slid downward in New York City, elected officials anticipated a gradual and methodical reopening. Instead, the city was jolted back to life by demonstrations in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25. Floyd’s excruciating death, the life choked out of him by an officer’s knee pressed into the back of his neck for some nine minutes, was captured on a bystander’s cell phone. The video went viral, and protests erupted nationwide. The first recorded demonstration in New York City took place May 28, when about a hundred protesters marched from Union Square to City Hall in Manhattan. They were not the last, and similar protests flared all around the United States.
For weeks, demonstrations gripped the city. New Yorkers who took to the streets were animated not only by Floyd’s death, but by echoes of earlier Black Lives Matter protests condemning the murder of Eric Garner, a Black man killed by a New York City police officer with a chokehold on Staten Island in 2014. Anger at Floyd’s death was compounded by the recognition of disproportionate suffering in Black communities during the pandemic, ongoing debates over policing (“defund the police” became a prominent cry), and pent-up energy and frustration from months of lockdown.1
Marches, which were noticeably interracial, took the form of everything from small neighborhood gatherings to large, self-organized demonstrations that coursed through the city, drawing supporters and blocking traffic. Their mood was, by turns, angry, hopeful, and exhilarated. Most were peaceful, but when episodes of looting broke out, they renewed debates dating to the 1960s over order, justice, and the responsibilities of police and demonstrators alike. Comparisons between 2020 and 1968 were inexact, but as demonstrations mounted—and challenged police control of the streets—there was a feeling of insurrection in the air.
Since the Giuliani years in New York City, public protests had gone from being a normal part of city life to being viewed, at least from the perspective of authorities, as a nuisance that had to be controlled.2 Yet the protests and the looting seemed to catch police off balance. Even a curfew, the first in the city since World War II, failed to halt demonstrations after dark. Aggressive police tactics for crowd control, combined with police anger over attacks on officers (both in New York and in Minneapolis, where a police station was torched), raised the temperature on city streets. Demonstrations were peaceful in Staten Island, the city’s smallest and most conservative borough, but the calm that prevailed there was not evident in the rest of the city.3
Looters hit the posh Manhattan shopping district of Soho. A few days later they sacked mom and pop stores along ungentrified Fordham Road in the Bronx. In the Inwood section of northern Manhattan, a video recording of a police commander trying to enlist residents to prevent looting raised fears of vigilante violence. No major outbreak occurred in Inwood, but after later video footage showed local residents chasing away people presumed to be outsiders, elected officials criticized the police for playing with fire in a volatile situation.4
As demonstrations validated Black lives and condemned the kind of police violence that took the life of George Floyd, they also made visible, with painful clarity, deep tensions between the city’s police and a significant percentage of its population.5 Protests and debates continued through the summer over how to best police the city. Some critics called for the abolition of policing altogether, and officers—who felt insufficiently supported by city authorities— resigned from the department in record numbers. The city’s Department of Investigation criticized police performance as excessive, disorganized, and indiscriminate. In 2023 the city paid more than $13 million to settle a class action lawsuit filed by protesters who said police had violated their rights.6
If the Black Lives Matter demonstrations of 2020 set off arguments that would last for many months, the ebbing of the first wave in the pandemic brough a decline in cases that gave residents and health workers alike a summer of rest. In spare moments, they could reflect on what they had learned and what they might do in the future. If nothing else, the demonstrations of late spring and summer suggested that large outdoor gatherings were not conducive to spreading the virus. Until October, when cases, hospitalizations, and deaths began to rise (although not in the numbers of the spring of 2020), the city regained some of its old vitality.7
Back in April, Governor Cuomo had mandated mask wearing when social distancing was impossible, but not until New York’s lockdown was partially lifted in June were large numbers of people out and about. The return of something like a normal social life, when President Trump’s hostility to masking had already politicized the issue, raised the question of how widespread masking would be received. A New York Times survey suggested that the practice was followed by three-quarters of New Yorkers overall.8
In bars and restaurants, the use of outdoor seating and curbside dining sheds helped businesses stay open but left staff with the unenviable task of having to persuade customers to wear masks when they weren’t eating or drinking. This kind of burden was even greater for transit workers, who had to deal with passengers who did not want to wear masks at all. In Brooklyn in September 2020, when a bus operator repeated passengers’ demands that a man coughing on a bus put on a mask, the uncooperative man knocked the bus operator unconscious. By that time, transit authorities reported, 177 transit workers—the vast majority of them bus operators—had been “harassed or assaulted” by passengers over masking and social distancing requirements.9
By November, cases of COVID-19 were rising in the city, bringing concerns about a new wave of infections. Staten Island, where some residents resisted masking and social distancing requirements, saw a noticeable growth in cases. When a bar owner declared his establishment an “autonomous zone” that would not comply, legal wrangling followed and battle lines were set that would last well into the future.10
If events in Staten Island foreshadowed future disputes at the intersection of COVID-19, public health, and politics, the presidential election of 2020 suggested new political possibilities for New York and the United States. Joe Biden handily defeated President Trump in the city; of the five boroughs Trump carried only Staten Island, long the city’s most conservative borough. Protracted efforts to count absentee ballots around the United States meant that election results were not announced on the evening of Election Day, November 3. Not until November 7 did Biden gain enough electoral votes to win the presidency; when word reached New York, the city erupted with the kind of jubilation associated with the liberation of Paris in World War II.
Figure 15 At Black Lives Matter demonstrations, protesters took a knee and recalled both Colin Kaepernick’s National Football League protests against racism and the death of George Floyd, choked to death when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Photograph by Erica Lansner.
As 2020 came to a close in New York, vaccines against COVID-19 were being administered to medical workers and nursing home residents.11 With a new president headed for the White House, and hope (and anxiety) in the air about the vaccine, there was reason to believe that in 2021 New York would turn some kind of corner in the pandemic.
Thomas Barzey
Thomas Barzey lives in the Bronx, where he was born and raised. Currently an actor, he has worked as a stage manager, home health aide, and office assistant. His poem first appeared in Coronavirus Haiku, edited by Mark Nowak for the Worker Writers School.12
New York to across Africa
Streets filled with masked protestors
Unjust killing of black lives
From Lockdown to Curfew
Clifford Pearson
In early May 2020, Clifford Pearson, a writer, urbanist, and longtime Greenwich Village resident, began a diary to record how his neighborhood functioned under the stress of the pandemic. When George Floyd died at the hands of Minneapolis police officers on May 25, Pearson’s observations began to include protests in Washington Square against police violence.13
June 1
Just as my neighborhood was starting to emerge from two months of suspended animation and more places were reopening or preparing to test the waters, the looting began. Lily and I watched the video of George Floyd being snuffed out by a Minneapolis cop and were horrified. We followed the news reports as protesters marched in Minneapolis and then other cities. One night we saw footage of people breaking into places in downtown LA, stores and restaurants we had gone to when we lived there. The next night we heard about violence in SoHo and around Union Square, each about a mile from our apartment. Each day large groups of peaceful protesters marched through streets and into parks and squares. Yesterday evening I saw thousands head down Fifth Avenue and into Washington Square. There were speeches, chanting, sign waving, and police mostly keeping their distance. I took a few photos, then left—fearful of germs, not violence.
For the first time since 1943, New York City has a curfew. I’ve been here in bad times—the gritty 1980s, the Tompkins Square Park riot under Giuliani, the fallout of September 11, the blackout of 2003, the financial meltdown of 2008, and Hurricane Sandy in 2012, but never lived under curfew. This is new territory. On my way home yesterday evening, I went into Gristedes—my least favorite supermarket—and picked up some pasta sauce and canned soups, just in case. Stores that had stubbornly refused to board up their windows during the previous ten weeks as a sign of support to the neighborhood were nailing plywood to their street fronts.
Just a few days ago, all of us watched the numbers of COVID hospitalizations and deaths steadily drop and were hopeful that finally things were looking up. Most parts of New York State had entered the first phase of reopening and Cuomo said the city would probably follow suit next Monday. The early shoots of optimism may be crushed now. Is this the final blow that takes the city down?
Clueless as usual, Trump thinks that acting tough will make him look better. He threatened to use US armed forces on US citizens around the country, if governors aren’t able to control their cities. It’s probably an idle threat, but shocking nonetheless, a pronouncement that could push the country to the edge of martial law and a political abyss. I fear this use of the National Guard and forces in unmarked uniforms is a dry run for something bigger in November. Sure hope I’m wrong about all this.
June 2
This morning I wake up to the sounds of low-flying helicopters and sirens. When I go out for coffee I see plywood—the universal material of fear—going up on more stores and workers hammering in the nails with more urgency than yesterday. There was looting in Brooklyn and midtown last night. A few thugs breached Macy’s, though they didn’t seem to do much damage and most of them were caught. But panic is nearby and today’s curfew is set for 8:00 p.m., three hours earlier than yesterday. Everyone knows the troublemakers are distinct from the protesters and use the large gatherings as cover for their mayhem. No one knows what will put an end to this craziness. Can curfews and police action deal with the bad guys while letting the good guys exercise their right to peacefully assemble and petition their government? Or will the criminal activity end only when the protests do? And when might that happen? As William Goldman famously said (of Hollywood), “No one knows anything.”
As I write this, protesters are marching into Washington Square and the police have closed the public restrooms. So I need to go in order to preserve my right to go.
Now I’m in Hudson River Park where the restroom is still open. The sky is gray and hangs above Hoboken in layers of dark clouds. People exercise on the piers, walk their dogs, and stroll. But something is in the air and all we can do is wait and see. With the coronavirus we could help by staying home, wearing a mask, and keeping our distance from others. It never felt like enough, but it did “flatten the curve,” as they say.
This new strain of infection—from civil unrest—seems beyond our control and the greater the police presence, the greater the chance of senseless violence. Instead of focusing on the small bands of looters, thousands of cops are surrounding peaceful protesters after curfew and executing a maneuver called “kettling,” which none of us had ever heard of before and now everyone knows.
June 6
It’s a beautiful Saturday and draws what seems like the biggest protests since the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Thirteen days of marches and the crowds are getting bigger. I’m amazed they’re still going and am impressed the protesters have mostly kept their cool, even when confronted with cops in riot gear and swinging batons. The looting has stopped, so perhaps the police are finally doing something right.
Washington Square is packed with people: protesters, bystanders, curious onlookers, and some, like me, who come to read the paper and catch some of the action. On the walk to the park, I notice restaurants doing a brisk business selling alcoholic drinks and serving as mini-social hubs for folks desperate for a bit of interaction. Most establishments still have plywood up, but find ingenious ways of opening parts of their storefronts to the sidewalk and their customers. In the park, there’s a festive feeling—less angry and more optimistic than before. I see a few tables offering free water and snacks and watch people eager to participate in what seems like a historic movement. Something in the moment is calling all of us out of hibernation, if only to see what’s going on.
June 7
De Blasio finally lifts the curfew today, and the city is scheduled to start “reopening” tomorrow. Cases and deaths are down significantly. The protests continue and opinion polls show a growing percent of the American public supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. The country as a whole seems finally to be recognizing the deeply rooted and sprawling nature of racism—how it affects everything from the daily interactions of Black people with the police to disparities in health, income, and opportunity between people of color and White America. The protests have touched people in a way that most others in the past have not. Perhaps it’s timing, coming at a moment when most people are working from home and can take an hour or so to join in or at least watch.
Instead of enormous gatherings at major locations like the National Mall in DC or the Great Lawn in Central Park, the protests tend to be modest in size—a few hundred people here, a couple of thousand there—and they roam the city, occupying Washington Square for forty-five minutes, then marching up University Avenue to Union Square. I’ve seen them at Sheridan Square, which is pretty darn small, and wandering down Seventh Avenue. The decentralized, fluid nature of the rallies makes them more accessible and perhaps less threatening. You don’t have to go far to find one or make much of an effort to engage at least tangentially with one. That may explain why they are touching a lot of people and changing public opinion, even as their size is dwindling. They aren’t big, but seem to be omnipresent—in more than 120 cities in the US and now abroad too.
Are we finally at a turning point? Or is this just another moment of false hope? New York has suffered greatly during the lockdown and will remain hobbled as long as Broadway theaters, museums, and other cultural institutions are closed or drastically limited in their operations. It will be many months before office buildings, stores, restaurants, and clubs are once again filled with people and probably years before the economy fully recovers. But if we become a more just and humane society as we stumble forward, all the pain we are currently experiencing may be worth it.
Figure 16 Police and Black Lives Matter demonstrators in midtown Manhattan. Photograph by Erica Lansner.
Protests, Riots, and Retirement
Richard Brea
In late May 2020, the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis, Minnesota, police sparked demonstrations in New York City and throughout the United States. In June, the New York City Police Department disbanded anticrime units, arguing that they were an outmoded form of policing that alienated communities and too often were involved in shootings of civilians. Many police officers, however, believed they were an important tool for fighting crime. At the end of June 2020, Richard Brea retired from the New York City Police Department to work in the security industry.14
It was a very challenging time for law enforcement not just here in New York City, but throughout the country. Officers were viciously attacked; precincts and police cars were set on fire. And yet, there was no support from our elected officials. I personally felt that the New York City mayor at the time was a coward; he used the NYPD as a scapegoat to protect his political ambitions. He was willing to say and do anything, just to appease the angry mob. But it didn’t work. The mob got bigger and angrier, and his political ambitions failed miserably. But more importantly, I no longer wanted to be a pawn in this losing game.
Against his wishes, the officers of the 46th Precinct gave Brea a robust send off with bagpipes, a restored police car, and a helicopter fly by.
I love my cops. I love my community. I love this department. This department treated me very well.
At the time there was a part of me that didn’t want to leave because I felt that I was leaving my cops behind. And I felt guilty about that. I certainly didn’t want a sendoff. It wasn’t the right time for it.
And someone close to me said, this sendoff is not for you. It’s for them. It’s for the cops. They feel like they’ve been beaten down so much. Everyone has abandoned the police. Every media commentary is negative, and the cops need something positive. Some of them felt, finally, someone, is speaking up for us.
It was very nice.
I miss the cops. I was fortunate to work for a good community. A lot of great people.
But very challenging times.
Broken Systems
Alexandra L. Naranjo
When she reflected on the pandemic, Alexandra L. Naranjo of Staten Island criticized the police (a sentiment not associated with her borough) but also noted, as did others in Staten Island, that Black Lives Matter protests there were not accompanied by the looting and violence seen at some protests in other boroughs.15
The George Floyd murder was a senseless, barbaric example of a corrupt justice system in this country. Sadly, he is only one on a long list of African Americans who have been unlawfully gunned down by the bullies in blue we call police. Though, at the same time, I think it was a horrible tragedy that became the catalyst we needed for reform, carried by the outrage of citizens. I am currently upset to see that it may have been short lived.
This particular case definitely impacted my view of Staten Island. At base, I always knew racism had its roots here. Mainly on our south shore. The severity of it I didn’t really comprehend until I saw and heard statements on the subject with my own ears. People I grew up with, went to school with, not only making jokes about a man’s death, but becoming more and more brazen with public threats. It really opened my eyes to the insidiousness of generational racism.
I did not participate in the protest. Largely due to work and scheduling conflicts. But also because I feared getting injured in the process, as I already have multiple physical injuries that keep me from being active a large part of the time. Honestly, I am still extremely disappointed in myself for letting fear get the better of me here. Because if taking a risk for something you believe in isn’t worth it, then what is?
Like others interviewed by the Staten Island Coronavirus Chronicle project, she draws a contrast between protests on Staten Island and in other boroughs.
From what I remember, I believe the protests here weren’t quite as agitated, or violent maybe is the word I’m looking for. I believe this is for two reasons. One, being it is a small island, and the repercussions for such things would be more concentrated. Less ways to leave or escape fallout in a bordered environment with notably less transportation options. Two, being that there are less degrees of separation here. Any violent situation has a higher likelihood of impacting someone you know, their brother, best friend, aunt, or your mother’s dentist. It is harder to be anonymous here.
I think it is most important to understand the psychological and social impact this pandemic has had. I feel like the discussion, at the forefront, has been mostly financially/economically driven. About people losing work and some not being able to feed their families. I believe that this has been slowly addressed. Not well, but minimally addressed.
When it comes to the psychological, no one has moved a thumb to fix it. People at this point have experienced almost a year of isolation to varying degrees, which greatly affects the human psyche. Now, the powers that be are trying to usher those same people back into the roles they played prior without so much as a complimentary therapy session.
People have changed, and getting back to work will be the least of their acclimating issues. So much will go back into “getting back on track.” Though this pandemic has unveiled all of the holes in citizen care that have been brushed under the rug for decades. Health care. Child care. Stagnant minimum wage despite higher production and profit. Wealth disparity. Weak policy making. Broken justice system. Environmental complications and the oil industry. Higher education. Housing. The list is quite literally endless in my eyes. Banking systems and Wall Street.
Figure 17 Masked waiter, Upper West Side of Manhattan, November 2020. Photograph by Paul Margolis.
So many of our systems are broken, and this pandemic made so many of them glaringly obvious. At this point, I’m really just waiting to see if any of it will change, or if people will miss “normal” so badly that the entire country will stick its head back in the sand.
Opening Up
Kleber Vera (Flame)
Kleber Vera, an LGBT activist and resident of Jackson Heights in Queens, works as a hair stylist and performs in drag as Flame.16
I’m not sure when the lockdowns started easing for everybody else, but I know for myself, I started easing my own personal restrictions when the protest started for George Floyd. I was very upset and outraged about that and I felt compelled to be out there marching on the streets for justice.
And I remember the very first protest I went to here in Jackson Heights. It was the first time in months that I was around so many people in one space. Even though everyone was masked, everyone was socially distant—as much as possible—it was just still very surreal to go from not seeing anybody (except for the grocery stores) to being in a crowded area. So that was very weird.
It was horrible situations and horrible circumstances that got me out there. It also made me realize that it is possible to be outdoors as long as you wear masks and remain distant to be safe.
So that kind of opened up a world of possibilities for me. Aside from marching to all the protests, I started going out on my own a little more, going to parks. I started riding the buses, I started exploring the neighborhood.
Exploring Queens
It was really incredible to think that I’ve been living in Queens for fifteen years, and there’s so many parts of Queens that I haven’t even seen just because I was usually so busy going to work, going home, going to work, going home. So that’s actually a little nice, just exploring my area a little bit more.
I started seeking out other ways that I could help the community. I really miss doing hair. So I started doing hair at Travers Park in Jackson Heights either for free or by donations. Through posting pictures and videos of myself doing that someone reached out to me from NY1 and said they wanted to do a news story about that because I thought it was a really wonderful idea.
The public park became a space to meet people. It was just nice to see people out there trying to have some sense of normalcy.
As far as other public spaces like bars and nightlife, I was really into the Jackson Heights bar nightlife scene, especially the LGBT bar nightlife scene. I would go out pretty frequently. I went out once to go to a bar during the pandemic and it was just really strange having it be all outdoors. It kind of felt like Mardi Gras, like New Orleans.
I like that the bar scene has moved outdoors because obviously it’s just safer, but I miss being in the music and the dark-lit ambiance of the bars. I didn’t really enjoy it so much as an outdoor scene, especially now in the winter, which is why I only went once.
Activism
I discovered the food pantry out of necessity really. I couldn’t afford to pay my bills, let alone buy food and feed myself. I heard of this LGBT food pantry called Love Wins Food Pantry. And I thought it was a wonderful idea. So I went there to get food—I think it was June-ish, around Pride—and I fell in love with the atmosphere. I started volunteering with them and I’ve been doing that since.
I noticed trans women of color being represented and other members of the LGBT community represented. And I thought it was so wonderful, not just that they were giving free food away (because that was my main reason for going) but something really resonated in me seeing that representation and I wanted to get involved.
Love Wins Food Pantry is LGBT run for LGBT people, but no one is turned away. So anybody can come receive free food. That is every Friday at 11:30 a.m. at Friend’s Tavern, which is a local gay bar here in Jackson Heights. It’s on the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 78th Street.
This is LGBT run for LGBT people, but we do not discriminate. Straight, cis, everybody is welcome. So please come get free clothes. We don’t limit the amount of clothes that you can get, and we don’t judge. A lot of times we have families that are in need, but they also want to take some clothes to bring home or to send to their families, and you know, their countries of origin, that’s fine as well.
I was so inspired by Love Wins Food Pantry, I wanted to have a clothing drive that had a similar LGBT representation. And me being a nonbinary person, I thought it’d be really fun to kind of do these weekly events in drag. I could be out there, showing LGBT representation and still being able to help the community.
I started Free Clothing Queens because the other organization where I was volunteering doing a free clothing drive closed down, and I love the idea of Love Wins Food Pantry with the LGBT representation. I wanted to combine the two.
With the help of a few other volunteers from Love Wins Food Pantry, I created this event and that’s been wonderful going out once a week in full drag, giving out free clothing to the community, organizing events, helping people out. It’s been very, very rewarding and it’s been really nice to see it grow. We have like ten regular volunteers and a few other people that come once in a while to help.
We’ve done most of our events in Woodside, we’ve done events locally here in Jackson Heights, in Corona. Unfortunately, because of lack of transportation, we haven’t been able to hit other neighborhoods, but I would like to go to Jamaica, the Rockaways, you know, other places that were also really hit by COVID. Especially in the wintertime, coats are really expensive. It’s really nice for me to be able to go up to a family while in drag saying “here, here’s some free clothing for you and your kids” and having them receive that and appreciate that.
Mutual Aid Online
Through ACQC, AIDS Center of Queens County, I started also doing these Facebook live events where I would talk to people about self-care and how we can all help each other. We also started doing Zoom meetups every Monday, and that’s been really fun because it’s helped keep the LGBT community together. So I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy.
It’s been really good to get all the guys that were involved before COVID to get us all doing stuff together again, but it’s also been nice to open it up to other people that could not have attended the event in person before. I have invited my LGBT friends from all over the world, Europe, Africa, from all over. And it’s been really nice to welcome them into this Zoom space.
I’ve gone to Travers Park and gathered a group of friends together that have small kids and have done live readings to children in the park in drag. I think that’s very important to continue doing that as well just to teach kids empathy and understanding and love and talk about, you know, anti-bullying and issues like that. So literally everything that I did pre-COVID, I started doing again on my own smaller scale, just not really been able to get paid for it. I just can’t wait to get to the point where I can start doing it again for a living because the bills still keep coming.
And it’s been really wonderful, just getting to meet my neighbors, being able to help them appreciate us as LGBT people. Jackson Heights has always been a pretty LGBT friendly neighborhood, but there’s still some homophobia, transphobia. It’s nice to see them enjoying our help.
I think people see us in a different light now. Before they might’ve just have seen us as a nightlife people, people that walk the streets at night, going from one bar to the other, one club to the other. Now they see us in daylight helping out the community.
It’s really mutual aid. We all help each other out. This is not a competition. It’s not about, who’s better at distributing and providing for the community. No, we’re all in this together. We all want to help each other.
I went through a lot of depression in the beginning of this, and then once I started getting really busy with these side projects, these mutual aid projects, that’s been really emotionally rewarding. But then when the winter hit, we have this new strain, that’s been stressing people out, with the cold weather. I haven’t been quite as active as I was before, and I haven’t been leaving the house as much because of that. So I’m kind of back to the start dealing with depression, anxiety. I see there’s no signs of things getting back to normal for me; financially, relationship wise, haven’t really been able to see my family and friends, and it’s still taking a toll. But I got through it the first time I’ll get through it the second time. If there’s a third and fourth time, I’ll get through that as well. Just try to stay positive. But I would say definitely I’ve been very affected emotionally by this.
So I hope everybody gets through this well and happy and sane. I know that’s what I’m trying to do.
“I’d Like to Think I’m an Optimist”
Patricia Tiu
Patricia Tiu, who worked as a nurse at NewYork–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center during the first surge in the spring of 2020, saw some improvements by late May.17
My hair is finally growing back, which I wasn’t too worried about, I wasn’t the only one who lost hair due to stress.
Toward the beginning of May is when we started seeing progress. We were able to clear out our OR [operating room] and our PACU [Post Anesthesia Care Unit] in the beginning of May. Unfortunately you had some patients that died. In terms of our equipment, my hospital has been a lot better. We are definitely given the gear that we need when requested but it is also still monitored. We are still being emailed or advised to conserve, which is definitely understandable. Our N95s are still kept in our manager’s office, but when needed we are able to take them.
In terms of mental health I would love to tell all my nurses and essential workers and anyone who’s struggling: please, please reach out to anybody, whether that’s seeing a counselor, a friend, doing an activity. What we went through and what everybody is going through is not easy. I don’t think I’ve had real time to actually process everything that goes on. I did start seeing the counselor.
For the most part I feel okay, but I do have my times where I’m very upset. I could have a beautiful day, the weather was amazing and everything was great and suddenly I’ll be really upset. Or I could just be sitting here just like this and I’ll just start crying. And I don’t understand why. And I can be completely happy, I can even be with friends, and all of a sudden something just doesn’t feel right. So for anyone who is struggling, please, I advise you please go speak to somebody, it will only help.
What we went through is not normal and what we’re going through is not normal. There are a lot of other issues that COVID has brought out that we know of—job losses, people not being able to eat. I myself have been volunteering. I’ve been delivering food, I’ve been preparing food.
Different experiences
Everybody has a different experience. Someone who is stuck working from home has a different experience from me where I’m going in the hospital. Someone that is working in Elmhurst Hospital will have a different experience from someone that is working in like Long Island Jewish. There’s so many different experiences, just know that together we could get through it by raising awareness and helping each other.
I still, from time to time, do check up on the patients that I have taken care of.
It brings so much joy to see that some of these patients are doing somewhat well, possibly off the ventilator. And then it breaks your heart to see the patients that are still on the ventilator. That have been on the ventilator for more than forty days and you just know the chances are just getting slimmer and slimmer. And then you have the ones that just didn’t make it.
Typical day if I’m not working, usually go home, eat, maybe exercise or play basketball at open gym just with the community around here in Fresh Meadows or with my friends. Or go to the bar, have a drink or have dinner with friends or brunch. And then obviously play with my dogs. I have two dogs.
I ended up staying in Times Square Sheraton and I’m actually still there. For whatever reason, this hotel didn’t have a microwave for the first month and a half. And we had no fridge, I have to ask for a fridge and thankfully they put a fridge in my room. But it was definitely a struggle being able to cook for yourself. I brought a blender, I brought a rice cooker. I don’t eat out every day and I’m usually eating at home. So that was a struggle. What was nice is that they did have a shuttle that came back and forth.
Proud to be a nurse
The nurses that I work with every day, I’m extremely proud of them. Everyone stepped up, every single one of those nurses took initiative and didn’t say no. It makes me so proud to be a nurse. Our nurses acted as not just registered nurses, they acted as doctors, they acted as respiratory therapists. They acted as the nursing assistants. They acted like the cleaning services. We emptied out our own garbage. We cleaned our own floors. Nurses and medical staff are really superheroes.
I’m genuinely proud of all the nurses that have stepped up during this time because it was not easy. They really did the impossible.
The clapping at seven really made me feel good. You may have a nurse who had such a crappy shift, patients might have died on their shift and as they’re walking out, they hear somebody cheering. It makes a difference. It uplifts the spirit.
I miss seeing my friends and I miss playing basketball. It’s just like little things like that.
You’ve just got to tell yourself it’s going to come back one day, we just don’t know when. God willing my family is safe and will stay safe.
Health care needs to change, at least American health care.
I’d like to think I’m an optimist. After the protests, I usually go with my coworkers and get a drink. It’s been very refreshing to be able to sit down and have a conversation about the protests, about health care, about COVID. Just to have those conversations has been really good.
What else have I been doing for fun? Playing with my dogs is fun. [laughs] It doesn’t take much for me to have a good time. I usually see light in something that makes me smile, even if it’s the most minimal thing.
I ended up saving a lot of money during COVID. There was nowhere to go. No online shopping, no eating out, no dinners, no going to the bars or clubs or any of that stuff.
I’m constantly changing and growing for the better. I’ve definitely become more proactive in politics. I’ve always was proactive in public health but now actually using my platform to really try to educate everybody. I do believe I’m going to be a future leader. I don’t think I’m going to be running for Congress but a leader—if there are young people out there that are looking into the nursing career or who need help with something, I feel like I’d be able to guide people. I’ve had people already talking to me about getting into nursing.
I am in school right now in Hunter College to get my psychiatric nurse practitioner degree. And a main reason I did that was because I wanted to kind of tackle the issues of domestic violence and human trafficking and woman’s mental health, as well as public health in general, addressing disparities, helping immigrant families with health care because I feel like they’re very underprivileged.
And with COVID and with this movement, it has only made me more knowledgeable of how our government reacts and treats the people.
I really didn’t open my eyes till now and I think that having this knowledge and experience is only just going to make me a better leader. That’s how I feel and hopefully it happens.
Discrepancies
Keerthan Thiyagarajah
Rich neighborhoods seemed to bounce back faster than working-class neighborhoods. Keerthan Thiyagarajah moved from his parents’ home in Jackson Heights, Queens, to midtown Manhattan during the pandemic. Living with his girlfriend near the United Nations, he saw differences in how COVID-19 was experienced.18
My parents knew I was living with my girlfriend. They would drive over whenever they could, they would go to Costco, do their shopping and our shopping at the same time, and then they would drop it off in the city for us. And that was the only time we mingled face to face. But for the most part, everybody stayed home. I think that’s the thing I struggled with the most, my family struggled with the most.
We’re living in Midtown, two blocks away from the UN, a very wealthy upscale neighborhood. My girlfriend got a great price on an apartment, so why not? She was a college student at the time too, at Pace University. It was her final semester.
You can definitely see the discrepancy between the middle-class people in Jackson Heights to the wealthy upscale people working in Midtown. One of the big things I remember in Midtown was an imposed lockdown and curfew because of the rioting and the Black Lives Matter movement.
I was on East 50th Street and the precinct was one block away. And there was a barricade of police officers on Second Avenue, just blocking down the whole street, telling everybody to get home. And I remember them yanking off a delivery driver doing his job. He’s delivering food to people and yanking him off the bike and beating him with a baton. And that was one of the biggest things I saw. I remember seeing it on the news. I’m like, that’s literally up the block for me. That’s like a hundred feet away from me that I watched that happen on the news.
And I got out, I left the apartment, I stuck my head out the window just to see like what the hell’s going on outside. That was one of the craziest things I think I saw during that that time.
A lot more privilege in the city, in Manhattan. The city was getting a lot more people tested before anybody else. Restaurants were opening up way faster in the city.
When I went back home to Queens I would see everything still shut down, nobody was planning to do anything. There was no sign of people opening up stores or people going back out. But you can definitely see people in the city going out about daily lives. And I think the city opened up way, way sooner than any other borough.
I don’t think the middle and lower class had the same resources available to the upper class. Upper-class people had a lot more opportunities and a lot more resources available to them. I think that was one of the big things that I witnessed during the pandemic.
After the Surge
Phil Suarez
Phil Suarez, a paramedic, saw a lull in the pandemic in the late spring and summer of 2020.19
It was beautiful. It was no traffic. [laughs] People still didn’t want to go to the hospital. And there was no traffic. [laughs] It really was like nice in a sense. And I don’t know if that’s kind of mean or kind of selfish to say. But it was suddenly you had time to breathe, and you had time to process. It was crazy.
The drop-off in COVID-19 cases
Looking back, I felt that it came in very violent, and it left as abrupt. It was suddenly it was poof. It was gone it seems like. It wasn’t gradual—it was steeper, like all of a sudden it started dwindling, which goes to show the stay in place worked. The social isolation worked. To us, to me, it felt like all of a sudden it was just gone. You were still getting it, but not that intensity that we had in those three weeks.
COVID-19 and racial disparities
I was surprised that people were surprised. “Oh my god. The colored people are doing worse.” They always have. What’s the shocker here?
They are targeted by the fast food industry. Their access to health care is not as good as many others. And they have higher comorbidities because of social issues. So that they would fare worse in a pandemic is kind of like—to me it was—like yeah. They always fare worse. I was just shocked that even public health officials were taken back by it. Like what’s the shocker here?
I guess what was surprising and what we still don’t know now is why males were targeted, fare worse. Latino males and things like that. That was one of the things that was very intriguing that I definitely saw a trend. I definitely saw more males faring worse than women.
Heading into the winter
I survived the first round. I somehow walked away without getting it. I have no antibodies.
So I feel better. I have more knowledge. I don’t feel as hopeless as I did in the first round.
COVID is a really bizarre beast. I had this woman that’s eighty-nine years old. Tremendous amount of comorbidities. Obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes, the whole thing. And she was like three and a half weeks post COVID. She survived it. It’s incredible.
It’s dangerous. It’s all luck, this thing.
I put my guard down through the summer. Mostly wearing surgical masks. I’m back to wearing N95 on every emergency. I’m taking more precautions. I always sanitize everything in the ambulance between patients. So definitely I’ve put up my guard for the perceived second wave.
Beyond that, just hunker down. I think that we all need to sacrifice 2020. If we sacrifice 2020 and just stay in place, enjoy your family, enjoy your surroundings, I think we would be in a better place in 2021.
Drawn-Out Deaths
Richard Jenkins (pseudonym)
Even as the first wave of the pandemic eased, Dr. Richard Jenkins (a pseudonym) noticed after-effects that lingered.20
There were a chunk of people who had come in with COVID in April and I feel so bad for them. Even though the COVID part of what brought them in had presumably resolved, they had all sorts of cascading injuries to other organs. It started with a really bad pneumonia but they ended up getting so many complications. They had such a degree of multiorgan failure that they were just permanently on dialysis.
A lot of them were not able to come off sedation. Or when they came off sedation, they weren’t really waking up. And even though they weren’t brain dead, they had developed enough neurological injury that it wasn’t clear whether they’d ever return to their normal selves.
A lot of families didn’t really want to accept that, particularly because they couldn’t even be there to watch their course. They’re thinking of every heroic movie where their family member wakes up. But realistically, we were just kind of keeping them alive with dialysis and machines until they eventually withered away and died.
So there were a lot of people who had these really drawn-out deaths, to put it in the most blunt way possible, over two months.
His understanding of COVID-19
I’ve definitely learned some things. When you watch a movie about a disaster, after a month or two the brilliant scientists have figured it all out and have solved the problem. And this is much, much slower than any of that.
The toll COVID-19 took on him
Emotionally, I’ve gotten a lot more anxious about things.
I had one episode where I was having a pretty mild argument about something not substantial with my wife. And I all of a sudden kind of had some flashbacks to when I would be with the charge nurse trying to decide among the fifteen people who didn’t get dialysis who were supposed to, which three were going to get it. And for some reason I just started obsessively thinking about it. And I left the apartment and walked for like an hour. And just went onto a bench and cried for a long time.
I don’t think I have PTSD because that was only one time. I don’t think about it all the time. I’m able to function normally and all that. But something’s changed. Something’s changed. I definitely have a little bit of a darker color on things than I did before.
His biggest source of support
Definitely my wife. It’s not even a question. We’ve been through this entire thing together. I’ve been there to support her. She’s been there to support me. I couldn’t have done any of this without her. And she’s definitely my go-to for all kinds of support.
My mom has been great, too. I’ve been calling her every day and just kind of always checking with each other about how we’re feeling.
Racial disparities in the pandemic
In my hospital in New York, just because of the location of the hospital, 90 percent of the people we treated were Black or Hispanic. Maybe 10 percent were White, or very rarely Asian.
I didn’t feel like we were, at least intentionally, giving differential treatment based on someone’s race during the COVID pandemic. The way it felt like to me was that our Black patient population, and Hispanic patient population, were already just very sick in general. If I had a Black patient come into the kidney clinic who didn’t have diabetes and high blood pressure, I get surprised.
Those diseases, those chronic conditions run so rampant. And it’s pretty evident to us that there’s issues with medication access. There’s issues with access to good food. There’s insurance issues. I feel like we all try to do our best, but we kind of face an uphill battle.
For instance, you get a patient who doesn’t have good insurance and they probably wind up needing dialysis in a few months. But if they could just get a medication that lowers the potassium in their blood, that they can take chronically, you might be able to stave it off for a little while. But the medication won’t get covered, and you’re fighting with the company. And nothing is getting done, and it doesn’t get authorized. And then you’re like, “I have no choice but to start dialysis.”
Things like that build up and I think contribute heavily to the overall burden of chronic disease. When COVID comes in, a virus that really hunts down people with bad chronic diseases and affects them the most, then the virus is going to be that much worse.
I’ve always felt like our patient population was so riddled with diseases that were so hard to control. Where diet became such an issue because they couldn’t afford better food or they were dealing with so many social issues, like family members in prison. They’re dealing with legal things or issues with child care. So many problems that me trying to emphasize that they need to pick up this medication and eat better and exercise probably sounds like a joke to them. How are they going to actually be able to do those things?
But meanwhile, because they’re unable to do those things, all their chronic conditions are just getting worse and worse and we’re getting less control over them. And then boom, COVID comes in and hurts them so much more.
There’s also sometimes an issue of trust. I sometimes have encountered patients who are Black—and I haven’t seen this as much with my Hispanic patients—who are pretty blunt that they don’t really trust me. Straight off the bat, they’ll just say, “I feel like you’ve given me too many meds and that you’re experimenting on me,” or that “these medications are really making me sicker and I ought to stop them.”
And that’s a really hard battle to fight because I understand there’s a lot of historical context behind feeling that way. But I’m trying to give the best care I can and follow the standards and the guidelines. And I just try to be very open and be like, “Let me explain exactly why you’re taking each medication, and why we do this and what our thinking is behind it and the evidence. And it’s your choice, ultimately. I can’t force you to do anything. But this is why we’re doing it.” And I think maybe that gets through to some people. But I feel like the burden of chronic disease and the inability to control those is the bigger issue.
In sociological studies of disasters, the people with strong social ties and community bonds fared best.
The patients I’ve had who had a family at home, that had secure caregivers and stuff like that, were just generally doing better. Even if they were in their seventies and had a lot of medical problems, if they had a robust home health aide that was seeing them and family that was taking care of them, you can kind of tell.
You get these seventy-five-year-olds who have a health aide who just doesn’t know what their meds are, doesn’t know anything, and is just sitting there. And those people, you just watch them crash and burn and get COVID and not do well and end up in the hospital.
And then you find people who, like, their son is there and they can answer questions about their medication and they’re involved. And they’re just as sick. On paper it’s the same thing—seventy years old, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease. But they’re not ending up hospitalized.
Anticipating Vaccines
Jessica B. Martinez
Jessica B. Martinez is a global health expert with a background in virology and infectious diseases. By October 2020 she was hopeful that vaccines would change the course of the pandemic.21
There were a couple of times in April when I actually was scared. I remember having a couple of those moments where your heart kind of palpitates. And not scared for me but just thinking, like, the enormity of what’s happening. And now I think it’s even worse and people are so numb to it. And people are walking around, not here in New York, people still wear masks and stuff, but in the rest of the country. In all my years of imagining a pandemic, I just always assumed that people would have this feeling of self-preservation. And I am sort of shocked that that didn’t quite pan out the way that I expected it would.
I’m quarantined. I am one of those people who does not go out unless I absolutely have to. I’m not necessarily wiping down every piece of mail, but if I order food, I either pop it in the microwave where I can, or I wipe down the containers. I wear a mask everywhere, not just for myself but obviously for everyone else—I hope that other people wear masks for me.
I think the worst thing that I could possibly ever imagine is being part of a transmission chain. Because at this point, knowing everything that we know, anybody who’s out there being reckless, I don’t want to be dramatic but they have blood on their hands that they either infected someone else or they helped to pass on an infection or enabled infection transmission. And from my perspective, that’s my fear. I would never want to feel like I did anything that would, in any way, shape, or form, help transmit the virus.
I don’t mind being home with my husband. I’m happy to be home, I’m not one of those people who doesn’t like my spouse, so we have a lot of fun together. And so that’s been very nice. I don’t mind working remotely. I’m fine with that. And I don’t need to go to restaurants. I have socially distanced get-togethers with a few friends that I know have also been equally cautious and we’ll sit six feet apart from each other in a park.
I miss my friends a lot. I get to see a few of them. A lot of them are not in the city anymore. And I miss my family.
Vaccines
I’m feeling a lot better now that the FDA put out their guidelines, because I am a huge proponent of vaccines. Give me any vaccine possible, I’ll take it. I think vaccines are a modern marvel. And I think that they have saved millions and millions of lives, enabled and empowered millions and millions of individuals, and I think that vaccines are fantastic. And I love seeing this push of these companies spending dollars and money and time and effort to make these vaccines, and some of them are very exciting.
I will stand in line when it is my turn to get one. And what I mean by that is that I think that there are high-risk individuals, first responders, physicians, hospital staff, people who are at high risk from the disease itself, elderly people who are immunocompromised, they should all get it first. Then you get into the other population stratified by risk.
Race, the pandemic, and the difficulty of enrolling African Americans in vaccine trials and treatment
That’s just a broader challenge in general in medicine. Underrepresentation.
I went to med school. Doctors are human. My classmates were as blindly biased, racist as any cohort within the population. So yes, I think when you see these numbers coming out that say an African American baby is three times more likely to die—all things being equal and all other things being accounted for and corrected for—I mean that just tells you something, doesn’t it?
The pandemic and her relationship to New York City
Oh, I love my city. I love my city. I know that there are some neighborhoods and certain places that are seeing a spike but I am so proud of how this city has pulled together, with helping neighbors who couldn’t go out, doing everything they could to try to help businesses stay afloat. And now doing what they can to try to keep our numbers low.
I would not want to be anywhere else but here in a situation like this. And we didn’t leave—we had no interest in leaving, we never even considered leaving. And yes, you see the occasional person walking down the street that makes you want to kind of throw something at them and yell at them to wear a mask, but for the most part, people here got it and it’s probably because a lot more people here saw people die than most people in other states. People take it seriously here.
We know our neighbors quite well. I would say collectively our neighborhood was very good about checking in and making sure that the individuals within our neighborhood who didn’t feel comfortable going out had what they needed or some of the elderly were well-protected and had also what they needed.
Her worries going forward
I worry about the people who are least among us right now. I worry about the people who are on a fixed income who don’t have the ability to shop around for the food or the sundries that are safest. I worry about people who are living in the shadows. I mean, we all take for granted that we have the little guy from the deli who’s going to deliver your food, but who’s taking care of that person? And elderly, fixed-income people who are living in multigenerational homes where the kids are feeling generally pretty infallible, living right next to their grandparents. Even in New York where we have a pretty good social safety net, there are far too many people who are slipping through it.
Yes, this pandemic has really laid bare how unequal our society is. And even worse, how comfortable some people are with that. How okay they are with it.
I wish people would wear masks more. God, it makes my blood boil. When I see these people who are just so entitled, claiming that they don’t want to wear a mask because it’s so hard to breathe, I mean—try wearing a mask for sixteen hours in the ER.
Have Faith and Fight
Maribel Gonzalez Christianson
By November 2020 the worst days of the pandemic were a memory and the Bronx had resumed some of the functions and appearances of pre-COVID-19 life. Nevertheless, evolving public health regulations to track and limit the spread of COVID-19, rising expenses, declining revenues, and customers who did not want to abide by public health regulations made work difficult. Maribel Gonzalez Christianson, proprietor of The South of France, a Bronx restaurant, struggled on and kept faith with her neighbors and customers.22
We’re still hanging in there, still grateful that some months have passed and we’re still here. We’re still not knowing if we’re going to be here for one month to the next because the situation is still very precarious. Very delicate, very doubtful, and we’re still fighting. We’re doing the best to stay open, to keep staff employed. And it definitely is a struggle. The biggest problem is the whole up and down, up and down. Some days are good, some days are bad.
I’ve lost about ten catering jobs, which was equivalent to over $40,000 in lost revenue. And those things are very impactful. You still have all the ongoing expenses, all these operating costs, and they’ve increased because of the outdoor dining. To cover outdoor dining, my insurance has gone up almost $3,000 a year.
You have to make more trips, you’re spending more on gas, you have to buy less because you have to keep everything fresh. When you buy in bulk you’re able to save, but when you have to buy in smaller amounts in order to keep everything current and fresh, it’s more costly and it’s more cumbersome.
I used to buy once or twice a week, and now I have to do like three or four times a week in lesser amounts. If I know I’m going to have thirty customers as opposed to one hundred I can’t buy for a hundred because I’ll have wastage.
Municipal regulations brought expanded business opportunities and additional expenses.
At the beginning they said you can have outdoor seating, and you can have roadway seating, which is on the street; you can block off some area in front of your location. I went out and I bought what I thought were acceptable barricades and put signage on them. That was well over $2,000. Within two days an inspector came and said, “Now there are new rules, new guidelines and specifications to follow, and these are not acceptable.” To fulfill that and to have outdoor seating cost an additional unexpected $4,800 to get twelve barricades.
I understand having empathy for the city, this is all our first go around. And they’re doing the best they can to help us and stay in business. They’re flying by the seat of their pants. However, for a small business, when you’re told one thing and then a couple of days or a week later, that changes, that’s another investment. That’s a big problem for us. We need clear direction.
I’m calling 311. I’m calling the mayor’s office, the governor’s office. I’m calling Small Business Affairs, I’m calling Consumer Affairs. I’m all over the place, trying to find out the latest guidelines. They set up this New York restart hotline for small businesses. And often, they didn’t even know themselves. They said, “I’m sorry, we don’t have the latest update information to give you on that yet.” I often ask questions that they could not answer, and so that was extremely frustrating.
Moving forward, there has to be more concise and specific guidelines that we can all get in a timely basis and depend on and have assurance that we’re not going to have an additional cost after that because there’s going to be yet another change.
Aside from all the stresses of managing the operation on a daily basis, making sure that food is coming out on a timely basis, you also now have to be vigilant.
I’m constantly having to justify, explain, reiterate, repeat what the rules are.
“I’m so sorry you have to wear your mask.”
“If you’re sitting outside, you’re welcome to use the restroom, but you have to put on the mask.”
“You cannot hang out outside and stand holding a beer or an alcoholic beverage in your hand on the sidewalk talking, you can only consume when you’re sitting down at the table. “
You’re always being as polite as possible. There’s so many rules to follow. People forget, they don’t do it intentionally.
People are starving for socialization. I’m very much known as a cheers place, where everyone knows your name. Everyone is happy to see each other, and their inclination is to say hi and go up to them. But they forgot to put on the mask. And you’re constantly having to play vigilance with all those details. And people sometimes get annoyed and I have had to turn away business with people that are not believers in using masks.
People get frustrated. They become defiant—”Oh, it’s only for a minute” and “I’m only going to stand up for two seconds.”
And you can’t bend the rules. I didn’t make them, I just have to follow them.
Now there are many more inspectors throughout the city in the five boroughs. And they’re very vigilant, rightly so, and they come in unannounced, to spot check your place if you’re not enforcing the rules. You’re also required to keep a log of not only your employees’ daily temperature, but of anyone that comes in to dine. At least one person per party has to provide the contact information in case of any illness.
And so they don’t want to follow the rules. I can’t risk what could very well be a $10,000 fine. So I’ve had to say no to customers and excuse them from the premises.
I am counting on my community to say that they are not only with us, but with all small businesses in all times. I think it’s important that people realize that the mom and pops is America. And we hope that people realize that by supporting local small business, supporting your neighborhood, it’s always worth it. And we strive to be worthy of that.
I remain positive that we’ll be able to overcome this. I’m hoping that things will turn around for the better.
I believe in New York, I especially love and believe in my Bronxites. This cannot last forever. We will overcome, they will find a vaccine. We will end this. It’s all incumbent upon us to take care of our fellow citizens, our fellow Bronxites. We can’t despair and we have to have faith and hang out a little longer.
Figure 18 July 13, 2021: Dining sheds, Koreatown, West 32 Street, Manhattan. Photograph by Tom Pich, Corona Chronicles Collection, City Lore Archive.
We’ve overcome so many other things as New Yorkers, and we’re strong and we’re warriors. And so you have to have faith and you have to fight.
The Best Place to Be
Jessica B. Martinez
New Yorkers waited anxiously for four days to learn the results of the hotly contested 2020 presidential election, but when Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was announced on the morning of Saturday, November 7, the city erupted in celebrations. New Yorkers, recovering their talent for public festivity, gathered in parks and intersections, formed motorcades, and cheered from apartment windows. One of the celebrants was Jessica B. Martinez, a global health expert who had watched the progress of the pandemic with concern and fascination.23
I stayed up until about four o’clock in the morning on election night, that’s when Michigan flipped over, and it was looking like Georgia was, and Arizona as well, and at that point I felt I could go to sleep. And Pennsylvania was trending in that direction as well. At that point, I actually felt optimistic. I won’t say that I was certain but I was pretty sure that Biden was going to win, it was just a matter of time. We just had to be patient.
Figure 19 Columbus Circle, November 7, 2020: Exultation at a motorcade to celebrate Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Photograph by Erica Lansner.
And then when he was declared the winner, being in New York City was just about the best place you could possibly be. People were running out in the streets with champagne. We did the same. Everybody was screaming, banging on pots. We did drive down through Times Square that evening, in sort of that promenade of cars that was going down and everybody was screaming and hollering. I mean it was fantastic. It was absolutely fantastic.