Introduction

In the spring of 2020, during the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, New York City was silent. Streets were empty. At its worst, close to eight hundred people were dying every day.¹ Riding a subway or walking past a stranger, everyday tests of urban sociability, seemed to become matters of life and death. 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. All who could worked online or huddled at home. Direct human connections, the oxygen of city life, carried the threat of mortal danger.

This book, based on oral histories, first-person narratives, and poetry from New Yorkers who lived through the pandemic, tells the stories of how New Yorkers not only suffered, but—in acts of solidarity great and small—coped and worked to help the city recover. Small gestures accumulated, direct ties forged larger bonds, and in the work of people as varied as clergy, retail workers, nurses, doctors, EMTs, and restaurant owners, I glimpsed a little-recognized truth of the pandemic: in the days when New York felt abandoned and besieged, it was saved from the bottom up. How this solidarity was built, along with its strengths and limitations, must be remembered and understood if we are to fully fathom the history of the pandemic and grasp what needs to be done better in the next public health emergency.

Nothing in the city’s recent history prepared anyone for the full onslaught of COVID-19. The cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century and the global flu epidemic of 1918 had been forgotten by the general public. The AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, while devastating for the gay community, did not immediately threaten the entire population the way COVID-19 would. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were deadly, but with the exception of first responders who died lingering deaths from breathing toxic smoke, ash and debris, the carnage was limited to one terrible day. International cooperation contained SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2003 and left people confident in public health authorities.²

New York City had a robust system of public and private hospitals and a Department of Health with a nationally recognized reputation. It also had a long history of effective public health campaigns: the nineteenth-century sanitary reformers whose works created a cleaner and healthier city; the public health clinics of the Progressive and New Deal eras; the mass vaccination campaigns against smallpox and polio after World War II; and the successful efforts to reduce smoking during the Bloomberg mayoralty. The city seemed well positioned to face the challenge of COVID-19.³

The pandemic, however, would reveal a more troubling reality. Since the fiscal crisis of 1975, New York had slashed the robust commitment to public welfare on a social democratic scale that had once defined the city. Hospitals were closed in Harlem, the South Bronx, and Brooklyn. Many hospitals reduced their number of beds for a variety of reasons, including a shift from inpatient to outpatient care made possible by improvements in drugs and surgical techniques and the growth of hospice care at home. Hospitals received varying reimbursements from Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurers—leaving hospitals serving the poor with fewer resources than those with a mix of patients. This set the stage for extreme challenges when the pandemic hit. The city maintained public hospitals, but these had weaker funding than elite private hospitals. In areas inhabited by people of color, working-class people, and immigrants—where overcrowded housing made for the rapid transmission of communicable diseases—financially strained hospitals lacked the capacity to treat a large influx of patients. In a city once famous for its ability to manufacture clothing, the departure of garment manufacturing left hospitals dependent on global supply chains for basic equipment like masks and protective clothing. And then came the COVID-19 pandemic.⁴

By April 2020 a month of lockdowns and wailing sirens made it clear that the city’s institutions were ill-equipped to handle the emergency. Hospitals set up refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies of the dead while overwhelmed funeral homes struggled to cope.

At an online meeting of historians, archivists, folklorists, and documentarians, Josh Brown of the American Social History Project suggested that COVID-19 would be a historic event on the scale of the Great Depression in the 1930s.With that thought in mind, many of us took steps to document the unfolding disaster for future generations. We were determined to avoid the unfathomable precedent of the last great pandemic to sweep New York city, the flu of 1918, which took some thirty thousand lives but was not marked by a single memorial and left no long-term impact on public consciousness. The AIDS epidemic and terrorist attacks of 9/11 had their memorials, but as precedents neither aligned perfectly with COVID-19.⁵

Oral historians at Columbia University, the College of Staten Island, Fordham University, and the Queens Memory Project organized interviews that could be conducted online and by telephone to eliminate the danger of getting infected with COVID-19 at an in-person interview. Archivists at Brooklyn College, the New York Historical Society, the Schomburg Center, and the Museum of the City of New York began to collect first-person narratives, photographs, paintings, digital resources, and objects from everyday life under COVID-19. The folklorists at City Lore launched a group poem and collected oral histories, poems, young people’s responses to the pandemic, signs, song parodies, and memorials to the dead. Historians Ellen Noonan at New York University and Peter Aigner at the Gotham Center for New York City History at CUNY set up websites to exchange ideas about working through the crisis and to document the many COVID-19-related projects that appeared in New York City alone. All these efforts produced a trove of sources that will be mined for years to come to produce many books, articles, films, and exhibits on COVID-19 in New York City.⁶

It was too soon to attempt a history of the disaster, but the right time to compile people’s first impressions for future generations. As Manhattan Borough Historian, I wanted to produce a book that would ensure that the experiences of New Yorkers during the pandemic were not forgotten. With help from Gracia Brown and Brendan Reynolds, I started to read transcripts of the interviews that were being conducted around the city with the goal of publishing a selection from them in a book.

After many months of reading, I dug into the more difficult job of selecting what to publish. My goal was not to produce an encyclopedia of experiences that was statistically representative of all New Yorkers, but a record of illuminating lives and memories. Again and again, I was drawn to interviews and poems that got at the depth and complexity of people living and working in hard times: a man who lived through the AIDS epidemic who drew on the lessons of that plague to work at a hospital through COVID-19; an immigrant paramedic who learned to take calculated risks as a mountaineer and likes to work in low-income neighborhoods that need his services; a restaurant owner who delivered food to locked-down customers and provided them with not just meals but human contact. Then I conducted interviews of my own to round out the range of experiences presented, especially among transit workers and uniformed first responders.

The stories of COVID-19 survivors and the stories of people who lost loved ones to COVID-19 were poignant. Survivors who contracted COVID-19 sometimes went to a hospital and lingered for days in a shadowland between life and death. Those who lost friends or family to COVID-19 were haunted by the thought that their loved one died alone, their last earthly sensations carried to them through a cell phone, held up next to their death bed by an obliging nurse. People coped with loneliness and loss. They learned to persevere and share their burdens in the hopes of someday emerging from the pandemic whole and healed as both individuals and as a city.

But the goal of surviving, in both a medical and a civic sense, was advanced most by the people who—paid or unpaid—went out and worked. Their stories are at the heart of this book. Knowingly exposing themselves to the dangers of the pandemic they drove buses, ran subways, answered 911 calls, tended to the sick, erected memorials to the dead, and made and delivered meals. Individually and collectively, they affirmed the bonds between New Yorkers and kept the city functioning.

New Yorkers were “alone together,” in a morale-boosting phrase of the day. Yet they were separated by both the protective measures of social distancing and the fundamental realities of life and work in New York City: it was immigrants, people with low incomes, and people of color who were more likely to do jobs that required face-to-face contact in the city’s service, retail, and transit sectors and more likely to go home to crowded housing where the virus spread easily.⁷

Relatively well-off New Yorkers could stay safe within the confines of their private apartments and order takeout food or, if they were sufficiently affluent, retreat to their country houses. It was far more dangerous for a delivery worker to spend endless hours on a bicycle delivering takeout food to multiple customers, and then go home to an apartment with three generations of family members to wrestle with the fact that they might be carrying the virus that would kill their grandmother.

COVID-19 made connecting with other people awkward at best and dangerous at worst. Still, New Yorkers found ways to reach out to one another to cope, to mourn, and to perform the unheralded jobs that are essential to keeping the city running.

In an age when so much of reality is understood as “virtual,” they faced actual hardships in the streets, on subways, in stores, and in hospitals. Their work affirmed a point made by the literary critic Paul Fussell: there are only two classes of people—those who might get hurt or killed on the job and those who won’t.⁸ The pandemic dramatically expanded the number of jobs that carried a mortal risk, then doubled the inequality by disproportionately claiming the lives of Black and Brown New Yorkers.

Faced with such dangers—more than forty-five thousand New Yorkers and more than a million Americans died of COVID-19 from 2020 to 2023—people who worked under the threat of COVID-19 were sustained by many different beliefs and values. Medical workers, firefighters, and police officers were strengthened by professional ideals of courage and service. Others who worked for the common good were fortified by class consciousness, religion, pride in work, and a desire to sustain their neighbors. Still others worked because they had no alternative: they had rent to pay or families to support.⁹

Just as COVID-19 touched all aspects of people’s lives, from ideas about politics to how we approached grocery shopping, New Yorkers drew on different corners of their lives and selves to meet COVID-19’s challenges. In the interviews, poems, and narratives that I studied, conducted, and selected, one of the most prominent themes was solidarity: where it comes from, what sustains it, and what it can accomplish. There is a venerable tradition of writing about solidarity in times of crisis. Rebecca Solnit has argued that the spontaneous generosity that occurs during disasters reveals our better selves, makes us our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and can create what her book title calls A Paradise Built in Hell.¹⁰ There was much of this in COVID-19, from the people who sewed protective masks when they were in desperately short supply to the young people who helped their elders wrangle vaccine appointments from badly designed vaccination registration websites.

Solidarity, however, came up against limits. There were heroic examples of mutual aid in New York City during the pandemic, but neighborhood action programs acting alone could not produce the vaccines needed to stem the spread of the virus. Volunteers have an important role to play in facing long-term crises, but we also need professionals who can engage them full time. If we are to do better in future public health emergencies, we need to reconcile the tensions between professionalism and voluntarism to produce the best possible mixture of both.

And the story of the pandemic in New York City was not entirely a story of solidarity. National political divisions leached into local debates over masking, vaccines, and the best ways to bring people back together after the deadly surge of spring 2020. The origins of the virus in China led to anti-Asian violence, attacks on Jews rose during the pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations responding to the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 illuminated protestors and police bitterly at odds with each other. Once vaccines were introduced and COVID-19 became less lethal, there was less foxhole solidarity. Demonstrations against vaccine mandates for municipal workers occurred in lower Manhattan, and restaurant workers were troubled by customers who showed no enthusiasm for mask mandates.

By May 11, 2023, when federal authorities declared the COVID-19 public health emergency ended, New Yorkers—like their ancestors after the flu of 1918—were entering a state of collective amnesia, forgetting things that had happened to them only a few years before. But memory can help us prepare for the future, especially when it helps us understand the best of human responses to a crisis. “People need to hear,” Vaclav Havel once wrote, “that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.”¹¹

Against forgetting, ignorance, and disinformation, this book sets down individual memories, confirmed facts, and a wide range of experiences. Here are the words of forty-five New Yorkers who struggled through the COVID-19 pandemic. Their contributions are organized both thematically and chronologically, from the eve of the pandemic emergency in early 2020 to its official end three years later.

In reflecting on their passage through the pandemic, these contributors left for future generations a record of courage, heartache, strength, wisdom, and compassion. If you find some surprises or inspiration in their words, this book will have done its job.

Their stories begin on the eve of the pandemic, in the early months 2020. Even as terrifying reports of the virus causing mass deaths in Italy reached New York City, many New Yorkers gathered in crowds as if somehow their city would escape the worst.