Reconsidering “Sanctuary City” Status

Should American cities be “sanctuary cities”–enclaves that welcome undocumented immigrants and pledge not to cooperate with the federal agents who are attempting to enforce national immigration laws? Two of our country’s largest cities, New York City and Chicago, are wrestling with that issue, which has been brought to a head by the border crisis and the movement of thousands of migrants to their cities.

Last week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for changes to the laws that make the Big Apple a sanctuary city. His immediate focus is on migrants who commit serious crimes; he thinks they should be deported and that the City authorities should be able to communicate with federal ICE agents to accomplish that.

Existing NYC law prohibits cooperation with federal agents if a foreign national has been charged by a crime but not convicted. More than 150,000 migrants have come to New York City in recent months, causing the city to incur an estimated $10 billion to care for them and also producing what the New York Post has called a “migrant crime wave.” New York’s City Council rejected Mayor Adams’ call for change in the “sanctuary city” laws, however, and now the Mayor is exploring whether he can accomplish the change through some kind of legal action instead.

In Chicago, City Council initially approved, and then reconsidered and rejected, a public referendum that would have allowed voters to address whether Chicago should remain a sanctuary city. More than 25,000 migrants have come to Chicago recently, and the city is struggling with housing the new arrivals. Supporters of the referendum initiative had hoped to allow the people of Chicago to have a voice on whether to continue the policy.

Many of the American cities that are declared “sanctuary cities” adopted the policies years ago, but the policies have been cast in a new light recently, with migrants who have crossed the southern border being shipped en masse to many northern cities. It will be interesting to see whether the cities will retain their commitment to “sanctuary city” laws as the cost of feeding and housing the wave of migrants, and the need to address the criminal activity of some of those migrants, put that commitment to the test.

NYC’s “Congestion Pricing” Proposal

New York City has come up an interesting approach to trying to ease congestion on Manhattan’s famously jammed streets: the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (“MTA”) has proposed assessing a fee on people who drive into the city’s core business area. The congestion pricing proposal would charge commuter cars $15 a day for entering the Central Business District below 60th Street, place a surcharge on cabs and for-hire vehicles, and charge trucks from $24 to $36.

The MTA says the proposal will generate billions of dollars in revenue that will be used to modernize New York’s aging subway system. The MTA is accepting comments and will hold virtual and in-person hearings on the plan, which is considered the first “congestion pricing” plan to be proposed by an American city. The comment period will extend until March 11. 

Some people in the area aren’t waiting for the hearings and comment period to voice their opposition to the plan. Several lawsuits have been filed, including a recent lawsuit by Lower East Side residents who say the plan will have a devastating environmental impact on their neighborhoods. Other objections to the plan have been voiced by elected officials who represent constituents in NYC “transit deserts,” where there are no viable public transit options and commuting by car therefore cannot be avoided, while others question the MTA’s ability to carefully spend the billions of dollars it forecasts will be generated by the fees.

The MTA says a thorough environmental analysis has been done; opponents say it was a rubber stamp of the proposal. You also have to wonder just how the MTA can accurately forecast what the impact of the fees will be. Manhattan’s commercial real estate market has been devastated already by the COVID pandemic and the shift to work from home policies; making those who are commuting to work pay $75 a week for the privilege of driving on Manhattan’s clogged arteries isn’t going to help that trend. Moreover, if more businesses shift to remote work approaches because employees don’t want to pay the added commuting costs, how is that going to affect the viability of the restaurants, bars, and storefronts that are key elements of the NYC economy? 

That distinct possibility makes you wonder whether the MTA forecasts of billions of dollars in revenue are actually going to be realized, or are based on assumptions about commuting that will prove to be baseless in the face of changes that companies and their employees might implement in response to the tax. And even if significant revenue is generated, given the cost overruns we’ve seen in large-scale American public works projects, can New Yorkers really count on the MTA to spend the money wisely and complete subway update projects on time and on budget, without concerns about politicized sweetheart deals, inefficiencies, disruption, and delays?

We’ll see how this all plays out, but for now I know one thing: I’m glad I don’t live in a city where I’m taxed for simply going to work.

Rat Tourism

People go to New York City to do many different things. For example, I once took a “Seinfeld tour” that carted a busload of the show’s fans to the diner where Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer hung out, the Soup Nazi storefront, and a number of other Big Apple locations featured in the show’s episodes–and gave us each a box of Junior Mints to enjoy during the tour.

But would I take a “rat tour” the next time I travel to Manhattan? No chance.

I’ve written before about NYC’s exploding rat problem, which has become so acute the Mayor named a “rat czar” earlier this year to address the serious health and safety issues presented by a growing rat population. But tour operators and TikTok personalities have realized that some people coming to town are really interested in those scurrying, squeaking, filthy rodents, and they are offering visitors to New York City the chance to see and experience rat-infested sites firsthand. And, while Gotham claims to be making progress in its desperate battle against the disgusting creatures, there remain lots of places tourists can visit to see rats in their native habitat.

Going to a place specifically to see a lot of rats sounds like the stuff of nightmares to me, but when it comes to tourism, it takes all kinds. Some people like city bus tours, some people like ghost tours–and apparently some people like rat tours.

Good ‘Wich, Bad ‘Wich

The prices you find in New York are always a cause for sticker shock for those of us who live in the hinterlands. But now even Manhattanites are expressing astonishment and dismay over being charged $29 for a ham and cheese sandwich at a Gotham eatery.

At a restaurant called E.A.T. on the Upper East Side, customers are paying $29 for a ham and cheese sandwich–which comes to $31.57, with tax. (The other prices shown in the photo above–$16 for a half ham and cheese sandwich and $24 for an egg salad sandwich–seem equally ridiculous, incidentally, but it is the $29 ham-and-cheese that has provoked true outrage.) The sammie is made with a decent, but not New York deli-sized, portion of ham, Gruyere cheese, mustard, and seven-grain “health bread.”

The price is so ridiculous that when a New York Post employee went to buy it, embarrassed employees at the restaurant offered to sell it for $22–which still seems absurdly high to my tender Midwestern sensibilities. The Post insisted on paying full price, however, and described the handheld as being like an airport sandwich, with bread that wasn’t very flavorful and hardly enough cheese and meat.

According to the Post article linked above, sandwich prices have jumped in the Big Apple recently–although $29 for a ham and cheese still expands the envelope at the high end of the cost scale. If you’ve got a trip to NYC coming up, you might want to pack your lunch.

The NYC Rat Czar

Job titles are important to many workers. At some banks, for example, it seems that virtually every employee is an assistant vice president. Many employees want to have important-sounding titles, and many businesses are perfectly happy to accommodate that desire–especially if the employer can offer title changes in order to hold down the size of raises.

New York City has now taken job titles to a whole new level. The Big Apple has its first-ever “rat czar.” Kathleen Corradi’s official job title is “Director of Rodent Mitigation,” but of course “rat czar” sounds a lot cooler. When the czar was introduced to the news media yesterday by NYC Mayor Eric Adams, Ms. Corradi promised: “You’ll be seeing a lot of me and a lot less rats.” Fans of ’60s TV shows no doubt will wonder whether her efforts to get out into the city and hunt down the filthy, disgusting creatures will be call the “Rat Patrol.”

What sort of resume do you need to become a “rat czar”? Ms. Corradi, who was one of 900 applicants for the job, has been an elementary school teacher, land use expert, and garden coordinator at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and was an advocate for anti-rat measures in her neighborhood. She will be tasked with trying to rid New York City’s streets and alleys of the garbage and food waste that rats love and deciding which products the City should use to exterminate the existing rat population.

One recent estimate concluded that there are about 2 million rats in New York City–and the population has soared in recent decades. The “rat czar” has a big job ahead of her. I hope she gets a cool uniform to go with the title, too.

A New York City Kind Of Information

Sometimes, just living in a place will make you privy to certain kinds of information. If you live in the desert, for example, you are going to accumulate knowledge about how to deal with extreme heat. If you live in a rural or semi-rural area, you might learn about what to do if a raccoon family moves in under your front porch or deer start munching the plants in your backyard. If you live in Columbus, Ohio, on the other hand, you’ll no doubt some to know something about Ohio State football, almost by osmosis.

A recent New York Post article indicates that many New Yorkers have picked up information about how to get rid of the smell of a decomposing human body in their apartment.

The Post article reported on a New York City reddit thread started by a Manhattan apartment dweller who described smelling a foul odor in his building and then learned that it came from a dead body in another unit. He asked for advice on how to get rid of the smell, and fellow New York City residents came through with a surprising amount of very specific odor-beating advice–suggesting that dealing with a dead body smell is more common than you might think. One respondent, for example, advised buying cheap pre-ground coffee and cooking it in a pan on medium-high heat, because “the smell of coffee drives out the smell of corpse.”

Coffee–is there anything it can’t do?

In case you’re interested, or living in Manhattan, other aroma-removal tips involved using baking soda and vinegar, pulverized limestone, and an ozone generator, as well as wearing a mask smeared with Vicks Vap-o-rub.

Hopefully, this is information that most of us outside the Big Apple never have to use.

The Relentless March Of Progress

In America, the march of progress is relentless, and what once was casually assumed be a permanent thing can be wiped clean by new technology or new approaches and vanish without a trace. The latest evidence of that classic aspect of the American Way is that the last freestanding public pay phone booth has been removed from New York City. The phone booth, which was located in Times Square, had become a kind of kitschy tourist attraction before it was hoisted away last month.

According to the Bloomberg article linked above, New York City once had 8,000 freestanding public phone booths. They were a familiar feature on Manhattan street corners. Phone booths were used by superheroes to change clothes, and figured prominently in countless spy dramas and action movies. Bad guys who were planning to commit bad acts used the booths to place anonymous phone calls demanding ransom payments, and spies used the booths as dead drops or meeting places. How many films over the years featured a star rushing to make it to a particular phone booth on a busy street in time to answer a call?

Now New York City is a phone booth-free zone. I’m not sure if there are any phone booths left in Columbus, and I frankly can’t remember the last time I saw a phone booth anywhere. They have been so rare for so long that I wrote about an unexpected sighting of a phone booth in upstate New York in 2011. Of course, screenwriters long ago adapted to the demise of the phone booth by using burner phones as the new anonymous device to move plots along.

In short, phone booths have officially joined the horse and buggy, television static, and Blockbuster stores as relics of a bygone era. That’s the American Way.

When Girth Is A Virtue

New York City is now home to the world’s skinniest skyscraper. The Steinway Tower has finished construction and is open for occupants. The building comes in at 84 stories in height, is 1,428 feet tall, and has a height to width ratio of 24:1. It is taller, and therefore skinnier, than the other slender skyscrapers that are found on what is being called “Billionaire’s Row” on West 57th Street.

There are 60 apartments in the Steinway Tower’s 84 stories, and as the photo above indicates, the Tower offers a commanding view of Central Park, the east side and west side of Manhattan, and the rivers beyond. According to the CNN article linked above, the prices are extraordinary, even by Manhattan standards: studio apartments are $7.75 million, and the penthouse goes for $66 million. (Seriously, who would want to pay $7.75 million for a studio apartment?)

Photographs of the building make it look like a gigantic, freshly sharpened pencil, and in addition to it’s super-thin appearance, it’s got other architectural flourishes. The facade includes blocks of terracotta, which appears to change color when seen at different times of day with different light and from different angles.

Separate and apart from the cost, and the height, it would take a special person, willing to put a lot of trust into architects, contractors, building materials, and super-height construction techniques, to live in this building. Super-skinny might be fashionable, but in my view when it comes to buildings a little more girth is welcome.

The Gilded Age

We’ve started watching The Gilded Age, a new HBO drama about New York City in the 1880s. The show is a prototypical period drama about an era when fortunes were being made and spent, the gap between the lifestyles of the poor and the wealthy became an immense gulf, the wealthy wore elaborate outfits (and changed multiple times a day) and adopted elaborate manners, and some people, at least, cared deeply and passionately about high society pecking orders and codes of conduct.

The series focuses on the households of the Van Rhijns and the Russells, who just happen to live across the street from each other in one of New York’s toniest neighborhoods. The Van Rhijns are old money and old New York, with all of the uber-snobbishness that attends that status, whereas the Russells are new money–lots and lots of new money, in fact–and have built an enormous mansion and happily engage in ostentatious displays of super-wealth, just to get some attention. In short, the Russells desperately want to be accepted into New York society, and at least some of the Van Rhijns are equally desperate to prevent that from ever happening.

As with any period drama, a lot of what’s interesting about the show relates to the setting and the recreation of the attire and practices of the era. The creators of The Gilded Age have done a meticulous job in that regard; the “production value” of the series is obvious, and the show is worth watching just for the ladies’ elaborate hats. But the incessant social scheming is entertaining, too, as is the upstairs-downstairs interaction between and among servants and served. Throw in overt insider trading in the unregulated post-Civil War era and business activities designed specifically to crush rivals and leave them ruined and destitute, and you’ve got a winner in my book.

Carrie Coon (an Ohio native who we first saw in The Leftovers) deftly plays Bertha Russell, who will do whatever it takes to claw her way into the highest levels of society, and Christine Baranski is delightfully snooty and formidable as Agnes Van Rhijn, the matriarch of the Van Rhijn contingent. The kids in each household act as a kind of buffer between that irresistible force and immovable object. My favorite characters so far are George Russell, played by Morgan Spector, the railroad baron who is good-humored home but implacably ruthless as the head of the Russell Trust Company, and Denee Benton as Peggy Scott, shown in the photo above, a smart and sensible young woman who has the talent and ambition to be a successful writer but will have to overcome the racism and sexism of her time to do it.

It’s hard to imagine there was a time when people cared so much about social conventions and family lineage, but one of the joys of period pieces is catching a glimpse of those long-ago worlds during their heyday. The Gilded Age does an excellent, and entertaining, job of recreating the era that gave the show its name.

Gone Too Soon

Everyone has a list of TV shows that–in their view at least–were inexplicably cancelled, or ceased production, just as the shows were hitting their stride and you were fully and firmly hooked. Kish and I spent the last few weeks binge-watching The Knick, which was broadcast for only two seasons and which ended with a cliff-hanger and numerous plot lines dangling, and we put it firmly into our pantheon of shows that we wish had continued.

The Knick tells the story of the Knickerbocker Hospital in turn of the century New York City. Led by the brilliant but hopelessly addicted and self-destructive Dr. John Thackery and trailblazing surgeon Dr. Algernon Edwards, the Knick deals with all kind of issues of the day: racism, mass immigration, rampant public health problems, addiction, appalling medical quackery, the eugenics movement, abortion, corrupt city government and skimming hospital employees, and just about every other problem you could imagine in an American city at the dawn of the modern era. It’s fascinating, and the rich historical setting itself adds to the fascination: it was an era when the early motor cars mixed with horse and carriage on Manhattan streets, travel by steamship brought a flood of rich travelers and impoverished immigrants to the City, electric lights were being installed, the x-ray was introduced as a diagnostic tool, and new approaches and inventions were found around every corner.

I am partial to historical dramas and period pieces, and The Knick does an excellent job of presenting the era. The sense of historical reality–from the street scenes, to the interior of houses, to the hospital’s surgical amphitheater and scrub room, to the pitch-perfect nurse outfits, the ambulance driver’s uniform, the fancy dresses, and the hats worn by seemingly every character–is total. And The Knick doesn’t downplay the primitive (by our standards, at least) medical and surgical techniques, either: Dr. Thackery is happy to try newly devised techniques on living patients (including, notably, himself) in the name of advancement of medical science, and total charlatans mingled easily with legitimate doctors. You’ll find some of the surgical scenes to be bloody and hard to watch, but also presented with the definite ring of authenticity.

Alas, The Knick ended in 2015, and we’ll never know what happened to Dr. Thackery, Dr. Edwards, hard-charging nurse Lucy Elkins, contemptible and corrupt hospital manager Herman Barrow, ambulance driver Tom Clancy, or the many other interesting characters on the shows whose tales must be left untold. But at least we got to enjoy two seasons of this very engrossing show. The Knick is right up there with Deadwood in our list of shows that were gone too soon.

High-Rise Woes

I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a 96-floor condo skyscraper in New York City, where units individual units were sold for millions of dollars and the structure towers over neighboring high-rises and undoubtedly offers fabulous views of Central Park and the surrounding skyline. But I do know this: if I had enough cash to pay millions of dollars for a condo in a brand-new building, I’d expect to get something that was as close to perfect as is humanly possible.

The New York Times recently reported that condo owners as one such Manhattan building aren’t exactly getting that kind of experience. Some residents complain that their building on Park Avenue, constructued only a few years ago, has a number of problems, including water damage from plumbing and mechanical issues, elevator malfunctions, and creaky walls. The Times article cites engineers who say that some of the problems at the building, and other titanic residential high-rises in NYC, are due to the challenges involved in building immensely tall structures and trying to find materials and construction methods that are up to those challenges. That shouldn’t be surprising; pipes can burst and walls and floors can creak even in single-family homes, and it’s obviously even more difficult to reliably deliver water, electricity, elevator service to residences that are hundreds of feet above the ground. And creaking and groaning is only going to be exacerbated by being up in the wind currents.

The developer of the building says it was a successfully designed and constructed project, points out that the building is virtually sold out (at an estimated value of more than $3 billion), and says that it is working collaboratively with residents and the condo board to address reported issues.

One of the residents who is quoted recognizes that there probably won’t be much sympathy for fabulously wealthy people who spent millions of dollars for their condos far above the streets of Manhattan. My reaction in reading the Times article is that it confirms that I would never want to live in a super-tall high rise in the first place, even if I could somehow afford to do so. But I also had this reaction: if I did own a condo in such a building, I sure would not want to see the problems at my building splashed across the pages of the New York Times.

My Last Trip To NYC

I flew to New York City on February 19, 2020 on a business trip that would be just like a hundred business trips to Manhattan that I’ve taken before.  My flight arrived at a packed LaGuardia Airport, and I steered my roller bag through concourse traffic, trying to navigate past the slow movers and the gawkers.  I used the bathroom at the terminal, standing shoulder to shoulder with other random travelers needing to answer nature’s call, washed my hands without thinking about whether I was spending 20 seconds on that task, then moved with the flow of travelers down to the baggage claim level and outside the terminal.  

I stood in line at the taxi stand with perhaps 25 other people patiently waiting to get a ride into the City.  I took the cab that was next in line when my turn came, without giving a second thought to who might have sat in the passenger seat before me, or when the cab was last cleaned.  I arrived at my hotel, located about a block from Times Square, and waited in the crowded lobby to check in.  Because it was a nice night and I wanted to get some exercise before dinner, I walked over to Times Square, stood among hundreds of other residents and visitors moving through that NYC landmark, and took this picture of the heroic George M. Cohan statue in the middle of the Square like a true tourist.  I then walked around the area, thinking about how hard it is to take an enjoyable walk in New York City because of the crowded sidewalks.  I even wrote a blog post about it the next day.   

I ate at a random restaurant suggested by the hotel concierge, without thinking about how close the other patrons were, or noticing whether they were sneezing, coughing, or having trouble breathing.  I slept in my hotel room, made coffee the next morning using the coffeemaker in the room, plugged my computer cord and smartphone cord into the outlets, then spent the whole day in a conference room that was full to the brim with about 20 people sitting right next to each other.  We all got coffee from a shared coffee urn and poured cream from a common cream container.  At lunch we got sandwiches and cookies from a common tray.  At the end of the day I took another cab back to the airport, stood in the TSA pre-check line with other passengers breathing in that LaGuardia terminal indoor air, and then navigated through the crush to get to my gate.

I was aware of the coronavirus at that point, but the only time I thought about it during the whole trip was at the gate, when I sat in one of the common seats in the gate area and wondered about the people who had sat in the seat that day, and where they might have been traveling from.  But it was a fleeting thought that passed by, and I then concentrated on checking and answering the emails that had stacked up during the day.  My flight was called, I stood in line to board with my group, and then sat in close proximity to other weary travelers on the 90-minute flight home.  To my knowledge, no one on the flight was wearing a mask.

As I sit and think about what was a pretty routine, uneventful trip to Manhattan only two and a half months ago, it seems like a totally different world.  I don’t know if or when I’ll take another business trip to New York City, but I can be sure of one thing — it won’t happen with the kind of carefree nonchalance that I felt, without thinking about it, on that last trip, or during the hundred or so trips that preceded it.

The Subway Vector

If you look at the New York Times map and chart of coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States, one fact screams out for attention:  the New York City metropolitan area has been far, far more affected by the epidemic than any other part of the country.  The disparity is profound.

As of today, the Times reports 34,726 deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. — and fully half of those are in New York and New Jersey alone.  The incidence and mortality rates in those states are orders of magnitude higher than in other areas.  And it’s not the entire state of New York that is producing those staggering numbers, either.  Instead, the hot zone is for the most part limited to New York City and neighboring communities.

In fact, if you cut the New York City metropolitan area numbers out of the equation, you find that the per capita numbers for the rest of America are far less alarming than the overall numbers, and much more in line with the data reported from other countries.  The vast disparity in the virulence and transmission of the coronavirus in the New York City area, compared to the rest of the country, is compelling support for making decisions on reopening the country and the economy on a state-by-state, locality-by-locality basis.

This drastic difference in the impact of COVID-19, though, begs the question:  why is the New York City area being hit so much harder than other areas?  Of course, it’s more densely populated than the rest of the country, which clearly must have an impact.  But there is an ongoing, increasingly heated controversy about whether New York City’s mass transit system — and, specifically, its subways — are a vector for transmission of the disease.  An MIT professor has looked at some data and argues that the subways are having a noticeable impact.  Others, including transit authority officials, contend that the MIT study is not scientifically valid and shows, at most, correlation — which is not causation.

It seems entirely plausible that subways could be a contributor to New York City’s bad coronavirus statistics.  If you’ve ever ridden the subway, you know that the platforms and cars are crowded, with people packed together, sharing metal poles as they steady themselves against the jostling of the cars, and also sharing limited breathing space.  The social distancing being practiced in other parts of the country just isn’t possible.  And, in my experience, the subway cars aren’t kept spotlessly clean, either.  If you compare that method of transportation to the “car culture” that prevails in other parts of the country, where most people travel in their own vehicles with windows closed, it could provide an explanation for at least part of the disparity in the coronavirus data.  At the very least, it is a possible cause and hypothesis that should be fully evaluated.

This is a hot-button issue, because New York City’s subway system is a primary source of transportation for hundreds of thousands of commuters every day, and if the subways are — after careful study and analysis, of course — determined to be a vector for transmission of COVID-19, that will dramatically complicate the process of reopening the Big Apple.  And mass transit is a political issue, as well, and there is a risk that political considerations will affect taking a hard look at the public health issues related to  subway use and operations in the wake of the coronavirus crisis.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen that our political officials can’t resist playing politics even in a time of global pandemic.  But at some point, public health considerations should trump petty political posturing.  We need to figure out why NYC is such a huge outlier, and then take steps to make sure that the causes for the disparity are properly addressed so that people in New York — and in the rest of the country — are protected the next time a virus sweeps across the world.

Into Full Dispersion Mode

Kish has been in touch with our neighbors up in Stonington, Maine.  Stonington, as you may recall, is a tiny lobster village located at the far tip of Deer Isle, jutting out into the Penobscot Bay.  It is a remote location, to say the least.

In their communications, our neighbors have mentioned something interesting:  many of the seasonal property owners are coming up earlier than ever before to open up their Stonington residences.  Normally, only permanent residents would be in Maine during this time of year, in what the locals jokingly call the “mud season.”  Typically, the summer residents wouldn’t show up at their Deer Isle places until late May or the beginning of June, at the earliest — and yet, this year, here they are already, up from New York City and Boston and Washington, D.C.

Can you blame them?  The big East Coast cities are COVID-19 hot spots, where many of the U.S. cases of coronavirus have been identified and there are concerns about how the medical facilities will handle the caseload.  In contrast, one neighbor told Kish that there are no reported COVID-19 cases in Stonington, on Deer Isle, or indeed anywhere in the surrounding county.  (Of course, nobody up there has been tested, either.)  According to recent news reports, there have been 155 cases of coronavirus in all of Maine, with most of those clustered in Cumberland County, where Portland is located, which is about three hours away from Stonington by car.

I would imagine that the dispersion from NYC and Boston to places like Stonington is being seen throughout Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont.  It’s mind-boggling to think of how difficult it must be for Manhattanites living on a densely populated island to achieve meaningful “social distancing” during this time.  If you’ve got to work remotely, and you’re fortunate enough to have the option of going to a faraway location where you aren’t cheek by jowl with other people as soon as you step out your front door, why not take “social distancing” to the max and head out to the remote, less populated areas and wait until the COVID-19 virus burns itself out?

Many of us wonder whether this coronavirus pandemic will result in lasting changes to American culture and society.  I think that one possible result is that more people will become interested in exploring, life outside the big cities, where there’s some elbow room to be had when the next epidemic hits.  They might just find that they like it.  And with the technological advances that allow people to work remotely, why not go into full dispersion mode?

Sidewalk Roulette

I’m in New York City today for a quick trip, staying just next to Times Square.  Last night I went for a walk before dinner and realized, again, what a special experience it is to take a walk in Manhattan in the midst of its extended pedestrian rush hour.

If you’ve only been walking recently on the sleepy streets of a city like Columbus, you’re really not prepared for the Big Apple pedestrian experience.  Not only are there fewer people walking around Columbus — by a factor of about 50 or perhaps even 100, I’d estimate — but there aren’t as many sidewalk obstacles, either.  No pop-up vendors shilling stocking caps, no dirty water hot dog stands, no mounds of trash bags waiting to be collected, no building scaffolding at some point on every block, no bike messengers zipping in and out. When you go for a walk in Manhattan, in contrast, you’ve got to be aware of all of those things as you navigate the crowded sidewalks.  Your mental reflexes had better speed up considerably, or you’re going to find yourself in trouble.

Walking to work in Columbus is a reasonably pleasant experience, where you can put your brain on autopilot and let your mind wander a bit.  In New York City, that approach would be fatal.  You’ve got to adopt a much more active mindset, with all senses on high alert, as you calculate distances, scan for openings in the ebb and flow of pedestrian traffic, and make sure you don’t tumble into an open cellar door or invade the space of a homeless guy sitting at the foot of a building who wasn’t visible until the last second when the foot traffic parted to pass him.

It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to experiencing the thought processes of a race car driver.  If I speed up, do I have enough space to pass the slow-moving guys in front of me and get back to my side of the sidewalk before the people coming in the other direction start cussing me out for disrupting pedestrian flow?  Should I cut around the street side of the scaffolding to avoid the woman with the baby carriage who’s blocking the way, or if I do that will I be able to get safely back onto the sidewalk before the approaching traffic arrives?  And when you’re walking in the area around Times Square, there’s the ever-present possibility that the person in front of you will stop in the middle of the sidewalk without warning to take a selfie or a photo of the Allied Chemical Building, so that factor also has to be added to the mental matrix.

Walking in New York during a busy period isn’t for the faint of heart, but it does get your blood pumping.  I can’t imagine, however, what it would be like to try jogging in this busy place, where everything comes at you even faster.