To hop on the train, any train, earbuds intact, alone in the crowd on the way somewhere else. To walk out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exhausted as if from a march. The sweet-potato fries and a beer at Tubby Hook Tavern in Inwood; the coffee-cart guy on West 40th Street who remembers you take it black.
Sunday Mass and the bakery after. Seeing old friends in the synagogue. Play dates. The High Line. Hugs.
Ask New Yorkers what they miss most, nearly two months into isolation. To hear their answers is to witness a perfect version of the city built from the ground up, a place refracted through a lens of loss, where the best parts are huge and the annoyances become all but invisible. The cheap seats in the outfield, the shouting to be heard at happy hour. Meeting cousins with a soccer ball in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The din of the theater as you scan the Playbill before the lights go down.
“I miss my gym equipment,” said Barbara James of Brooklyn.
“The lamb over rice from the food cart by my office, at Seventh and 49th,” said Chris Meredith of East Harlem.
“Just everything,” sighed a police officer sitting behind the wheel of his vehicle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, last week. “I miss everything.”
In normal times, in Big Apple, city-that-never-sleeps times, people flew in from all over the world to see and do the things locals could do on any given Tuesday. To have that access cut off for so long, with its return yet unforeseen, is to transform what it means to be a New Yorker.
The lockdown has made everyone into tourists, looking at old photos and Instagram and Facebook to find the city that was once outside the door.
“More than anything else, I miss the variety of New York,” said Eddie Antar, 58, of the Inwood section of Manhattan.
He and his wife, on weekends, used to take a train downtown, destination unknown. Maybe hop off at 125th Street and walk down through Central Park to Columbus Circle, and farther south, ending up in Lower Manhattan and hungry for dinner — a journey that now feels as exotic as a safari.
“Everything we do now is so localized, as opposed to having some sort of variety,” Mr. Antar said. “Even on an evolutionary level, we’re migrating creatures; we’re wanderers. It’s part of our DNA to wake up the senses with something new.”
Tommy O’Neil, 24, an elementary school science teacher from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, said he longed for those kinds of days — the aimless walks, each neighborhood a world-class backdrop to one’s inner thoughts. “As much as we complain all day, every day, about how many people live here, I miss busy sidewalks in the East Village,” he said. “The busy walks around Central Park. I miss the music.”
All over the country and the world, people long for what has been taken by the pandemic — some of it universal, some of it specific to that place, that city, that town. But the loss can feel almost impossibly strong in New York, in that what’s gone are the very reasons so many arrived. For the race, the drive toward the top of one’s profession. For the crowds. These are the things that make the rest worth it — the maddening rents, the subway delays. And, yes, the crowds.
To yearn for a bygone era that was vibrant as recently as 10 weeks ago still packs a psychic whiplash. “It suddenly has been ripped out from under all of us collectively, without even the chance to say goodbye,” wrote Kathryn Ghotbi, 26, a New Yorker of seven years, in response to a callout to New York Times readers about their state of mind. “It’s a singularly strange feeling to desperately miss the place you are.”
She sought for something specific: “The exhaustion of spending an entire day at a museum, and afterward, collapsing into a plate of delicious food at a local restaurant.”
Other losses are much more personal. On Staten Island, Lori Smith, 57, has spent the last month missing her older brother, Tommy Smith III, who died on April 10 from the coronavirus. They grew up visiting Manhattan for its record stores and music, which planted in her a deep connection to the city.
“I always enjoyed my commute. I never saw it as a drudge,” said Ms. Smith, who took the Staten Island Ferry to work at the American Kennel Club near Grand Central Terminal. “I loved the city — I love it, I love it. Even in the dead of winter, I see the little rays of light sparkling off the water. I enjoy those 22 minutes. They say 25, but it’s actually 22.”
She is a cheery street-level ambassador, happy to give directions to a tourist. “There are people in this world who save all their money to come here on vacation,” she said. “To see our city.”
There are things that people do not long for. Heavy traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Or on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Or anywhere — traffic all but gone, making a drive in the city feel like something from an old movie or a video game.
People relished the absence of other moments from the old life. Mr. Meredith, with the office near the food cart, quickly put a name to what he does not miss: well-meaning strangers.
“I’m completely blind,” he wrote. “One of the problems I face during morning and evening commutes is the barrage of people who presume to be ‘helping’ me by grabbing me by whatever limb is handy,” or even his cane, “and dragging me where they think I need to go.” The lack of that has been refreshing.
“I miss New York, though,” he said.
To miss New York is to yearn for the big-ticket blockbusters that were just a subway ride away — the Yankees, the Mets, the season tickets that have been in the family longer than you have. Madison Square Garden, the marquees on Broadway. But it is also to miss the little corners its people find and hold close.
For Liz Maggiotto, 41, it’s Bread and Yoga, a favorite studio in Inwood. For Cydney Weisel, 26, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, it’s brunch with friends — wherever — and a weekly gathering to play the board game Betrayal Legacy.
For Yan Zheng, 52, who runs the Lucky Family Grocery in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, it’s the Blue Color Hair Salon two doors down. “You go and you don’t think about anything else,” she said, speaking Mandarin. “You just relax.” In Buddhism, she said, hair is called “three thousand troubles,” or “trouble silk,” and so a haircut “is like throwing away your troubles.”
For Elizabeth Curtis Bergin, 31, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, it’s daily interactions, “the little exchanges with strangers when someone drops something on the street or you give up your seat on the train and feel, however briefly, connected,” she wrote.
Ms. Maggiotto, more than she misses her yoga studio, longs for the day when her 4-year-old daughter, Livia, can act like a child again.
“Yesterday, her best friend came to visit and say hi in front of our building, but both kids were just not interested,” she said last week. “Where usually we’d say, ‘Go play’ or ‘Say hi,’ and now we have to say, ‘Stay away’ — it’s just completely unnatural.”
And not only for children. Many people looked past the city’s polish and shine and said what they really wanted was something you once could get almost anywhere.
“I haven’t been hugged in months,” said Michelle Velasquez, 33, a personal trainer in Fort Lee, N.J. “I think about the people that are losing everyone, and I can’t imagine losing a loved one and no one’s going to hug you. Or, you’re in the hospital and you’re sick and no one is going to hug you. My birthday came and went during quarantine, I didn’t get a hug. Then, I had to put my cat of 15 years to sleep, I didn’t get a hug then. More and more I realized, ‘Oh my God, I’m a hugger.’”
Susane Colasanti, 47, a young-adult novelist in Gramercy Park, Manhattan, knows better than anyone what she yearns to see again.
“Myself,” she wrote. “I miss my normally positive attitude, my resilience, my determination to succeed.”
Ms. Smith, mourning her brother on Staten Island, takes comfort in thinking of her return to the ferry and the city she loves — an experience she is grateful to have savored long before it went away.
“I enjoyed it when I had it,” she said. “I knew it was special then.”
Reporting was contributed by Jo Corona, Lauren Hard, Derek M. Norman, Nate Schweber and Jeffrey E. Singer.
"What" - Google News
May 09, 2020 at 04:48PM
https://ift.tt/2xMiqzc
What New Yorkers Miss: The Met, Subways, Crowds, ‘Just Everything’ - The New York Times
"What" - Google News
https://ift.tt/3aVokM1
https://ift.tt/2Wij67R
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "What New Yorkers Miss: The Met, Subways, Crowds, ‘Just Everything’ - The New York Times"
Post a Comment