Ghostly Midtown is an omen
Switch to remote office work could be lasting change
New York Editors and account managers at the Time & Life Building in midtown Manhattan could once walk out through the modernist lobby and into a thriving ecosystem that existed in support of the offices above. They could shop for designer shirts or shoes, slide into a steakhouse corner booth for lunch and then return to their desks without ever crossing the street.
To approach this block today is like visiting a relative in the hospital. The building, rebranded a few years ago and renovated to fit 8,000 workers, now has just 500 a day showing up. The steakhouse dining rooms are dark.
On a sidewalk once lined with food carts, a lone hot dog vendor stood one recent Friday on a corner below the building. His name is Ahmed Ahmed, andhesaidheusedtosell 400 hot dogs a day.
How many now?
“Maybe 10,” he said. Midtown Manhattan, the muscular power center ofnewyorkcityfora century, faces an economic catastrophe, a cascade of loss upon loss that threatens to alter the very identity of the city’s corporate base. The coronavirus’s toll of lost professions, lost professionals and untold billions of lost income and tax revenue may take years to understand and resolve.
Other neighborhoods are rushing to reopen, while midtown remains stuck in a purgatorial phase zero, its very purpose — to bring as many humans together as possible — strangling most hope of a convincing comeback in the foreseeable future and offering a sign of what may lie in store for business districts across the country.
Upstairs, floors are mostly empty as companies reassess their need for office space, raising serious questions about the future of the city’s commercial real estate market. Downstairs, streets were lined with the creature comforts that made working in midtown not only bearable but even fun. They are vanishing, and with them, the men and women who fed, clothed, poured drinks for and drove the people in those tall buildings.
Subway data tells a story as stark as Ahmed’s cart. Take the Rockefeller Center subway station, a major stop for four train lines and the point of entry and exit to the neighborhood for workers from all over.
Last year on June 24, a Monday, there were 62,312 Metrocard turnstile swipes as riders entered the station. On the comparable Monday this year, June
22, the number of swipes was 8,032, a staggering 87 percent decrease.
In jeopardy of extinction, at least in its known state, is the corporate office culture at large — its corner suites and cubicles, coffee breaks, office crushes, shoeshines, black cars.
Among the first lawyers through the door of the Time & Life Building was Martin Luskin, who has spent 41 years with the firm. His biggest fear, looking across the street at Rockefeller Center, was the holidays ahead.
“We were petrified, hearing stories about the tree lighting, and the weeks before and a couple of weeks after,” he said. “But in the end, when you get used to it and see the excitement in the families bringing their children to see the tree, the excitement takes over. It’s an energizing effect.”
Now his spot is his home in Westchester County, staring at clients on his screen instead of alongside breathtaking views in midtown.