Day 114…
The plywood is mostly down along 5th Avenue now. A week or two ago, almost every storefront along its entire midtown length was completely covered up.
The stores, themselves, in that area, are mostly still closed because there are still no tourists around to shop in them. It may just be where I was riding the other day, but it seems to me that the majority of the stores that remain boarded up are foreign-owned. Perhaps they are watching the news and cannot imagine reopening in the middle of a raging pandemic that appears to be totally out of control. The Barnes and Noble store at 46th Street, was almost the only place actually open for business on Wednesday.
We can finally walk around the outdoor plaza at Rockefeller Center again. The long avenue across from Saks, that is lined with heralding angels during the holiday season had been barricaded off from pedestrians for several weeks. The famous ice rink is covered with a tarp that says, “New York Strong” in gigantic letters.
Victoria’s Secret on the Upper West Side is still completely boarded up and a homeless man has taken up residence in front of it. It may be one of the stores in the chain closing down permanently as they attempt to restructure. Because the area caters mostly to New Yorkers, many of the other businesses up here have reopened on some level.
In SoHo, which was one of the hardest hit areas of Manhattan by violent agitators during the recent demonstrations, the plywood was transformed by painters into an outdoor art gallery. It reminded me of the wall in Berlin - a long section of which remained standing after the rest of it came down. The section that stayed up, stayed up because of the artwork and has become a museum of sorts.
Galleries that have removed their plywood have taken steps to preserve the pieces and store them. There are still many places down there where the plywood remains up. Every time I bike through there, I see incredible new work appearing on the raw surfaces. SoHo is another area of the city where the stores rely on tourist traffic so a lot of the stores there remain closed, too.
I remember coming into Manhattan from New Jersey in the late 70’s when I was in High School. It was not the city then that it is now. 42nd Street was all porno theatres and boarded-up store fronts. I was mugged once in the middle of Times Square by two guys who took my wallet and my gloves. It happened out in the open in broad daylight.
After World War I and continuing into the late 60’s and early 70’s there was a large movement of poor African Americans from the south who moved north searching for better lives.
When they arrived north, they faced a wall of obstacles from the White European Americans who were already here. Segregation and redlining were common. Redlining is the denial of services to certain segments of the population through the selective raising of prices - a practice that is now illegal but still happens. As they moved into cities like Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis and New York, the white middle-class fled to the suburbs.
By the time I started coming into the city, so called “white flight” had peaked. There were few jobs available in the city, so unemployment and crime were rife. Tax revenue was way down because nobody was earning any money. Graffiti was everywhere. Subway cars were so covered that you couldn’t see out of the windows and no light could get in.
In the early 1980’s over 250 felonies were committed every week on the transit system making it the most dangerous in the world. Many buildings were just abandoned and boarded up. People shooting up heroin out in the open on the street was a common sight.
I remember when I started going to school here in the beginning of the 1980’s that it was not safe to walk the ten blocks north of where I live now up to Columbia. Joan Armatrading had a concert at Carnegie Hall that I didn’t go to because I couldn’t figure out how I’d get back uptown that late in the evening.
Manhattan Theatre Club used to have their offices and rehearsal studios downtown on West 16th Street. I can’t remember what show I was rehearsing there, but I remember us all being excited that Stephen Sondheim had paid them to install a metal gate over the recessed entryway. He was rehearsing the original production of Assassins and the trans street walkers on the corner used the recessed doorway to defecate in. He was tired of stepping over it on his way to work.
Over time, the city improved.
The 42nd Street project slowly started reclaiming the Times Square area and renovating the theatres there. Those of us who have worked in the 42nd Street Rehearsal Studios in recent years continually have to deal with the seemingly over-the-top cleanliness rules there. All of those rules came out of the building’s phoenix-like rise out of the completely dilapidated state that it had descended to during those past times.
A huge public relations campaign was launched to get people to come to New York to visit and to live. And it worked.
By the time we hit the last election, 20% of the world’s population were living in cities of 1 million people or more. An economist named Edward Glaeser has demonstrated that urban density increases productivity and lowers the overall carbon footprint. New York was thriving.
Since its rebirth in the 1980’s, New York City has taken several hits.
After 9/11, the destruction erased 30% of the area’s office space and displaced 100,000 office workers for many years.
My father was one of those workers. My father worked across the street from one of the towers.He had been on the verge of retiring when the planes hit. He had argued with his bosses that he could work remotely and still be able to do his job, but they wouldn’t hear of it. After the devastation, everybody in the office had to work remotely so my father moved to Florida with my mother and didn’t retire at that point after all. He worked, I think, for about ten more years from home.
The 2008 financial crisis also restructured the way a lot of people downtown worked. Since then the number of people who actually work downtown in person has substantially decreased.
5% of the NYC population have left the city during this pandemic. The rate in Manhattan is more than three times higher than that. Many friends of mine have been sheltering with their families elsewhere. More wealthy friends have chosen to ride this out in their weekend or summer homes far outside of the city.
As all of these people get used to working remotely, are they going to want to stop?
Not having to pay New York rents on office spaces is, in and of itself, I would think, a huge advantage. Not having to face a daily commute is something many people thrill to think about. I’ve talked to several people who are seriously thinking about leaving the city for good and only coming back in as needed.
You might think that that wouldn’t be possible for those of us in the theatre industry. The truth is that Actors spend the overwhelming majority of their time auditioning rather than performing. Auditions can happen from home. Michael has gotten some of his best gigs taping himself here in the apartment. Many voice-over artists have been taping in their home studios for years.
Almost none of the team I work with on Jersey Boys live in New York anymore. One lives in Encino, CA and another in Edmonton, Canada. Others are in various suburbs around the city. It took a while, but we’ve figured out how to make it work.
Cities will always provide something that outlying areas can’t. Cultural institutions require a certain level of nearby population density to survive. New York supports a wide range of museums and theatres that, regardless of where people actually reside, attract them to the city.
We may start seeing an increase in tourism and a decrease in residential living as a result of all of this. I think Michael would like to live in a smaller upstate town, but I don’t think that I am ready to think about that.
What will this ultimately mean for New York? Are we going to see another flight?
I dunno.
We are heading out of town today for the weekend to spend some time at a friend’s house. We are looking forward to the isolation.
Michael’s sister and her husband are coming in to stay in our apartment. They are looking forward to being in the city. I’m sending them downtown to SoHo to take a walk through the streets so that they can see some of the spectacular and moving painting that’s down there before it all gets packed away.
But we are coming back. I’m not ready to let New York go yet.
New York is where I'd rather stay
I get allergic smelling hay
I just adore a penthouse view
Dahling I love you but give me Park Avenue
the times they are
a changin’...
and me too
I’m staying
💕