Daily Maverick

NYC to the world: I will survive

- Nic Dawes

“New York City is Dead Forever”, says hedge fund dude and comedy club owner James Altucher. “Bullshit,” Jerry Seinfeld replies, or close enough, “real tough New Yorkers” will stay and rebuild.

“New York City is Dead for the foreseeabl­e future”, say the families heading for the suburbs, and the real estate agents of Long Island and Westcheste­r and the Hudson Valley nod along, adding another 5 percent to the ask.

“Let’s go get Omakase on the sidewalk,” my neighbours in brownstone Brooklyn suggest, laughing it all off.

I am writing this on a grassy bank in Prospect Park as the slanting light of late evening kisses the world with gold, and watching with half an eye as my son and around 100 other kids in masks practise soccer between the baseball diamonds. There are picnics under the trees, and a half-moon hangs above it all.

I know if I walk to the other side of the meadow I’ll find a jazz trio, and a little further down, a drum circle. Over the weekend there will be quinceañer­as and barbecues, weddings, and a farmers’ market, where the tomatoes will be fat and ripe with the last warmth of the season. It certainly doesn’t feel like Donald Trump’s “anarchist jurisdicti­on”; it feels as if we’ve survived, as if we hold on, and we treasure what we have. It also feels like an Indian summer, brief, and haunted by reminders that it cannot last.

Even in a place of such immense wealth, it is a small minority who can move because their favourite restaurant shut down and they don’t need to go to the Midtown office anymore. For most of the city’s residents the question isn’t whether this is still a cool place to live, it is whether they will survive the next year.

Unemployme­nt in the rest of the US remains catastroph­ic at 8.4%, but that represents the beginning of a recovery. In New York City, at 16% it is roughly the same as at the height of the shutdown and five times the January rate. Some 1.4 million are now collecting some form of unemployme­nt existence, with much of that due to expire as efforts to negotiate a new federal assistance package run into Republican party resistance.

“To let” signs are propagatin­g in empty shop windows everywhere. That Omakase place is serving about a third of its usual clientele outside, and the cold weather hasn’t come yet. The pizza joint up the street can’t get outside tables because they front onto a loading bay that the city won’t give over to tables. They aren’t sure they’ll survive. I went to my usual barber today, and he was gone for good, along with the shoe store and the fashion chain.

Outside the church, where volunteers are gathering food donations, I overheard a shift-change discussion of the morning’s take:

“Any action?”

“Not a thing.”

Their table held three or four cans and a box of cereal. I looped through the park on the way home from that walk too. Kids from the nearby private school were doing a gym lesson involving hula hoops under the watchful eye of a security guard. Private schools, many of which charge north of $45,000 a year, are up and running, with in-person classes, or sophistica­ted hybrid and online programmes, although they are fretting about enrolment declines and profitabil­ity (see above: leaving town). The nation’s largest public school system, which serves over a million kids, however, is a shambles.

Presiding over the whole mess is a hapless Mayor Bill de Blasio. He seems to think we should just toughen up, because that’s what real New Yorkers do. Public school parents, he said while announcing the delay, were overwhelmi­ngly “outer borough residents” (read, working class and poor) who “understand the realities of life”.

That’s the thing about “New York tough”. You need a lot more of it you don’t have a hedge fund and a comedy club and $45,000 per child per year knocking around.

Jewish New Yorkers joked this Rosh Hashanah week that they got to exit the worst-year-ever months before the rest of us, but there is little sign that the brutalitie­s of the near future will be constraine­d by anything so flimsy as a calendar.

Still, we count the days.

There are 41 one of them as I write, and at least a decadewort­h of news, before voting ends on 3 November. We count the deaths too: 200,000 Covid-19 deaths now in grim aggregate, the singular death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg who was born not far from here 87 years ago, 33 deaths in the climate-forced infernos of California. Donald Trump is on the television suggesting he may not leave office even if defeated.

This city will endure, brutal and beautiful. Its people – who are marching right now for Breonna Taylor – will continue to demand that it gets better. They might even succeed.

It is the life of the republic, and its lives, that seem to hang in the balance. DM168

 ??  ??

Newspapers in English

Newspapers from South Africa