New Year, New York
Signs of the city's 2021 comeback are everywhere you look
YOU want hope for New York City in 2021? I’ll give you hope where you didn’t think there was any.
We need the vaccines to work, of course. But when the story’s written of how the Big Apple came through the pandemic, its true heroes will be the people who strode bravely through the gates of hell and never looked back. That’s to say, those who not only didn’t give up on the city when there seemed every reason to do so, but who put their money down on its future. We’ll see many more of them in 2021 and they’ll be our inspiration to hang in with Gotham no matter how many “experts” foresee only doom.
Sure, there are scores of empty storefronts in every neighborhood. Old news! Less reported is that lots of them are coming back to life. A few blocks from me on First Avenue in the East 70s, shuttered Mexican café Two Lizards was quickly replaced by something called Mexiterranean Grill. Nearby, a health-food shop became Bilao Filipino Cuisine. Who expected Filipino food on the supposedly staid Upper East Side?
What guts family owners must have to risk their all on a new venture amidst a pandemic!
Onthe retail front, middle- and high-end merchants are taking advantage of plunging rents to expand and even to open large new stores. Target is launching new outposts in Midtown, Harlem and The Bronx. Jeweler Harry Winston is doubling its space on Fifth Avenue.
On the publishing side, an outfit called Street Media plans to bring the Village Voice back from the dead in early 2021, both online and in print. The legendary alternative weekly folded two years ago. Didn’t its new owners hear that our city is dead?
The new ventures can’t make up for the many more businesses that we lost and more closings certain to come. But such seeming follies in the face of COVID-19 are no small things. They’re the inspirational way stations in our journey toward eventual comeback.
Thanks to them, recovery will occur despite the flight of some selfish rich to their Hamptons and Connecticut retreats. It will happen even with our mayor’s one-man ruin of schools, policing, homeless services, the municipal budget and sidewalks, now buried beneath garbage heaps as big as the Matterhorn.
But — more hope for 2021 — Bill de Blasio isn’t forever. We’ll soon know who our next mayor will be. The Democratic primary in June will almost surely cast up the eventual winner. The mere prospect of a new leader in City Hall raises spirits.
New Yorkers can also look forward to more concrete portents of revival. The magnificent, long-promised Moynihan Train Hall — inspired by the original Penn Station — opens in January after years of delays. Little Island, the floating public playground mounted on mushroom-like pillars in the Hudson River, makes its bow in the spring.
Make no mistake: The year to come promises no instant shining path out of the dark. Nobody knows when Broadway and sports venues will reopen — just two hallmarks of our prayed-for “return to normalcy.”
But with the clock ticking down on a horrific 2020, remember that December is always a dark month, even though Christmas lights pretend otherwise. And it’s been darker before.
Imagine the mood in December 1941, when
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor plunged the nation into a war with no foreseeable end and dispatched America’s young men to remote battlefields. The pandemic disruption of holiday celebrations pales in comparison to World War II’s family separations that were tragically permanent.
A few months after Pearl Harbor, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia ordered Times Square’s bright lights turned off for the rest of the war to protect the city from enemy bombers. Times Square today is empty but the lights stay on. We won that war and we will win this one too.