Acknowledgments

My first thanks go to the people who sat for interviews, wrote first-person narratives or poems, conducted interviews, and took photographs that are shared in this book. All are recognized individually on our contributors page. I am also grateful for the data visualizations of BetaNYC and for the photograph of Luis Fernando Lechón’s mural at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens taken by Nicholas Knight. Collectively, their work embodies the strength, humanity, and resourcefulness that New Yorkers brought to the challenges of COVID-19.

The majority of the interviews, narratives, and poems presented in this book were first collected in oral history projects, archival projects, and poetry projects in New York City. My thanks go to Ryan Hagen, Mary Marshall Clark, and Amy Starecheski of The NYC COVID-19 Oral History, Narrative, and Memory Project at Columbia University; Mark Nowak of the Worker Writers School; Natalie Milbrodt of Queens Memory; Thomas Cleary, librarian/archivist and assistant professor at LaGuardia Community College; Molly Rosner, director of Education Programs at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia Community College; Susan Smith-Peter, professor of history at the College of Staten Island and founder of the Lockdown Staten Island project; Steve Zeitlin and Seth Schonberg of City Lore; Claire Solomon Nisen, manager of Lasting Impressions at DOROT; Mark Naison and the students and faculty who worked on the Bronx COVID-19 Oral History Project at Fordham University; Rick Luftglass of the Healing Walls Project at the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; and Miriam Deutch, associate professor and director of the Open Educational Resources Initiative at the Brooklyn College Library, who served as cofounder and director of the Brooklyn College Journal of the Plague Year COVID-19 Archive. Ellen Noonan, clinical associate professor of history and director of the archives and public history program at New York University; and Peter Aigner, director of the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center, created websites that helped historians, archivists, and documentarians grapple with the challenges of COVID-19.

Historians David Rosner, Janet Golden, and Josh Brown helped me think historically about the pandemic. I also learned much from the participants in the Living New Deal panel “COVID-19, the Great Depression, and the Battle between Memory and Forgetting,” which was ably moderated by Margaret Crane. Participants included Dave Chokshi, MD; Sharon Musher, associate professor of history at Stockton University; and Karen Kruse Thomas of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. (I could not participate because I had COVID-19.)

Gracia Brown and Brendan Reynolds insightfully read scores of interviews and helped me winnow them down. Jessica Siegel’s research directed me to valuable pieces, including the work of David Rohlfing’s students at Pace High School. Elaine Abelson and Paul Sternberger helped me make some difficult choices in selecting photographs for illustrations, and Fritz Umbach helped me work through drafts of the book’s introduction and more. Kristen La Follette helped me compare and understand coping strategies during the pandemic and the Great Depression. Chris Herrmann helped me with statistics on crime. Mary Marshall Clark helped me think through issues regarding oral history, memory, and the work of nurses. Ada Huang, MD, read drafts of my chapter introductions.

Al Howard and Ron Grele introduced me to oral history. I have been grateful for their teaching and friendship ever since.

Reporting in the New York Times, THE CITY, and Gothamist helped me navigate the pandemic as a resident and a researcher and affirmed the importance of local journalism in a global city.

This book was produced during my term as Manhattan Borough historian to document New York City’s passage through a crisis and leave a record of the COVID-19 pandemic for future generations. I am grateful to Gale Brewer for appointing me Borough Historian during her term as Manhattan Borough President and to her successor, Mark Levine, for continuing my appointment.

As in every book I have written, I have been inspired by writers and authors who have come before me. The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest domestic crisis to hit the United States since the Great Depression; in my work on the pandemic, I was inspired by the writers and editors of the Federal Writers Project, who worked to weave together a divided and suffering country in the 1930s. In Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940, the French historian, soldier, and Resistance member Marc Bloch sought to understand how France was defeated so badly in 1940 and what it needed to do to revive itself as a republic. The United States needs a similar examination. George Orwell’s essay “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” written in the early days of World War II, argued that to win the war England needed to become a more democratic and more egalitarian country. I have learned from all these works, and I think they have something to teach other Americans in the shadow of COVID-19.

Two peer reviewers engaged by Cornell University Press offered questions and suggestions that strengthened the book in the home stretch. Any errors that remain despite the suggestions of all these good readers and advisers are my own fault.

Michael McGandy, formerly an editor at Cornell University Press and now director of the University of South Carolina Press, offered valuable advice in the early days of planning this book. He was followed at Cornell by Mahinder Kingra, who handed the book off to Meagan Levinson, editorial director of the Three Hills imprint at Cornell University Press. Meagan’s sharp suggestions and collegial encouragement improved the book and sustained my morale in the home stretch. I am also grateful for the help I received from the rest of the Cornell team: Acquisitions Assistant India Miraglia, copy editor Jack Rummel, Assistant Managing Editor Karen Laun, Production Coordinator Kate LeBoff, and, in marketing, Alex Vlahov and Alfredo Gutierrez Rios.

As with every book I have written, Peter Eisenstadt was a great source of historical and editorial suggestions. My wife, the journalist Clara Hemphill, provided superior editorial advice and was an excellent companion in the long months and years of the COVID-19 pandemic.