Two Years of the Pandemic: New York Looks Back

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll look at two years of the coronavirus pandemic. We’ll also look at a new kind of skating rink that is coming to Rockefeller Center.

In March 2020, it was clear that it was coming. But it could be managed. Minimized. Couldn’t it?

New York soon learned — agonizingly, sorrowfully — that the answer was no.

But in February and early March 2020, a city that did not know what it was in for was optimistic that it would fare better than hard-hit European countries like Italy, which did not have New York’s well-organized hospital system. Despite New York’s post-9/11 culture of emergency preparedness planning, the preparations were minimal.

And then case counts soared, emergency rooms became overloaded, ventilators were scarce and trucks were parked outside the medical examiner’s office. There was the lockdown — and the morass of new regulations on gatherings, on restaurants, on gyms. On faces.

Infectious disease experts like Dr. Celine Gounder had heard about Covid-19 months earlier, after the end-of-year holidays as 2019 gave way to 2020. She had told the residents she supervised at Bellevue Hospital in January to be on the lookout.

“I’m saying we need to be on top of this because this is going to come here,” Dr. Gounder, now a senior fellow and editor at large for public health at the Kaiser Family Foundation and Kaiser Health News, told me this week. “They’re looking at me like I’m crazy, it’s something out of the movies, never going to happen here.”

[What New York Got Wrong About the Pandemic, and What It Got Right]

Officials were slow to grasp the scale of the coming crisis. Bill de Blasio, the mayor at the time, sent four top aides a late-night email on March 11 headed “Need case studies ASAP.” He told them to assign the city Office of Management and Budget or the Mayor’s Office of Operations — not the Health Department — to “get me a quick initial analysis” of what three countries that appeared to be managing the virus “have done right” — Germany, South Korea and Singapore.

“Need to learn what works really, really quickly,” de Blasio said. “We are flying too blind.”

That email was a turning point for de Blasio, who had been slow to understand how fast the virus was spreading. He sent the email just after 10 p.m. on March 11, 2020, the day the St. Patrick’s Day Parade had been postponed and the N.B.A. season had been suspended. It was also the day the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic.

“It just seemed like the world turned upside down in the course of just a few hours,” de Blasio said the next morning. Only 12 days earlier he had said that the virus “could be anywhere” but that people could go on with their normal routines. Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, had said there would be “community spread” of the new virus but added that there was “no reason for concern.”

The city’s first death from the coronavirus was reported on March 14. “Very painful moment,” de Blasio said, though he added that it was “a moment that we all knew would come.” The victim was an 82-year-old patient at Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn who had emphysema, an underlying condition that officials said contributed to her death.

Now New York is struggling to move on. Bosses are calling the rank and file back to their cubicles. Restaurants are open for indoor dining — those that did not go out of business, anyway. A new mayor has lifted most pandemic requirements, including the mask mandate. Gounder said she was concerned that the objectives were not clear enough — and that they were primarily economic.

Her forecast, based on metrics like case counts in Asia and Europe, is troubling. “I think we’re at the beginning of another surge here as well,” she said.

“The good news is New York is relatively well vaccinated,” she said, “especially compared to the rest of the country.”

Weather

Expect rain and some patchy fog throughout the day and at night, with steady temps in the 50s.

alternate-side parking

Suspended today (Purim).

The problems at Rikers continue, a watchdog says

The Rikers Island jail complex remains “unstable and unsafe,” a federal monitor overseeing reforms there said.

The monitor, Steve J. Martin, said that the disorder was fed by chronic staff absenteeism. Roughly one in three guards failed to show up for work in late January, about the same as at the height of the crisis at Rikers last year, when violence soared and more than a dozen people died.

Martin’s assessment, in a report filed in federal court, was the first since Mayor Eric Adams took office and the first under Adams’s correction commissioner, Louis Molina. Martin said the Correction Department remained “trapped in a state of persistent dysfunctionality.” Molina did not respond directly to a request for comment about the monitor’s findings.

The latest New York news

• Yan Xiong, a Chinese dissident who immigrated to America and is now a political candidate on Long Island, was targeted by an agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors said.

• Jim Li, a Queens lawyer best known as a key participant in the pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, died after an irate client stabbed him in his office, the police said.

• An e-commerce boom turbocharged by the pandemic is turning the New York City region into a national warehouse capital, reshaping neighborhoods.

One kind of skating ends. Another is coming.

It’s almost time to put away those ice skates. And then? As our writer Jane Margolies put it, get ready for roller-skating at Rockefeller Center. A roller rink about half the size of the ice rink will open there next month.

Tishman Speyer, the owner of Rockefeller Center, is working to transform the venerable Art Deco complex into a happening place, trendy enough to attract locals as well as tourists and office workers (when they eventually return). Tishman Speyer has contracted with Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace, which was started by the daughter of the man who opened the original Flipper’s roller rink in Los Angeles in 1979. That was the year that the movie “Roller Boogie” came out — “the dopiest movie of the year,” according to our critic Janet Maslin.

Tishman Speyer has also brought in new retailers and restaurants, among them the American outpost of the British record store chain Rough Trade. It moved there with its inventory of 10,000 vinyl records last year after eight years in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Stephen Godfroy, one of Rough Trade’s owners, acknowledged at the time that Rough Trade and Rockefeller Center were not “obvious bedfellows.” But one appeal for Rough Trade was the prospect of staging events in the Rainbow Room, in 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

Liberty Ross, who started Flipper’s Roller Boogie Palace and is its creative director, said the programming at the Rockefeller Center rink would range from “meditative” early morning skate sessions to disco nights.

“Most people skate for that sense of freedom,” she said. “I feel like it’s going to be an injection of joy, community and unity, which is very much needed right now.”

What we’re reading

• Chowhound, credited with helping New Yorkers discover cheap and little- known restaurants, is shutting down after 25 years, Eater reports.

• Strawberries grown in a warehouse are coming to grocery stores in New York City, CNBC reports.

• At one East Village pub, Irish culture and literature is celebrated with readings and songs in an annual “Literary Cure” event, amNew York reports.

METROPOLITAN diary

Seeley Street

Dear Diary:

I walked slowly down the street, not able to take a full breath. There is a sharpness in my chest, my feet too heavy to lift.

And then a sound, a soft brushing, like a drummer keeping time. Two women sweeping leaves. The strokes are close, yet not together, a rhythm upon rhythm.

Around the corner, there is more sound. Three more women sweep crunchy, brown leaves. Somehow, they all came out at the same time this December morning to paint the street with music.

The sound of many brooms, each with many straws, each straw singing a pitch that blurs into a wash of high whisking tones.

The women look down at their own sidewalk, playing their own part, and here I am to enjoy the chorus of strokes.

Five different rhythms, more intricate than most songs, happening simply because the leaves fell to the ground, simply because it is somehow still autumn though it’s December.

Autumn is the season that he left. Is it possible this fall will never end — that I’ll eternally look at trees part bare, part colored in leaves, like we’re all just waiting to change but cannot quite let go?

— Mare Berger

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.

Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.

Melissa Guerrero, Reagan Lopez, Joseph Goldstein, Jeff Boda and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].

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