A Quarantine Love Letter to NYC
(Or How the Virus Made me a New Yorker)
Being a transplant to New York City can make you feel a bit like an imposter.
Sure, there are a lot of “if I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” people trying to prove a point. And while it isn’t always easy, it’s still a welcoming place evidenced most iconically by Lady Liberty herself lighting the way for newcomers — especially those from faraway lands. Nonetheless, even after nearly 12 years living here — longer than any place except where I landed for the first 18 — I had not been able to escape the feeling that there is always going to be someone who is more “New Yorker.” That is, until COVID-19.
There are people with the good fortune to have been born and raised here. People who lived through (and lost in) 9/11. People with lots of other NYC-specific memories of blackouts, snow storms and economic ebbs and flows that track when all the hippest neighborhoods were once no man’s lands.
Not that there is any one way of being New York. Most wonderfully on the contrary, there are so many different kinds of New Yorkers — neighborhood, ethnic, religion, art and industry ways of being and defining this city. But still, as a reverse-carpetbagger, I’ve felt a little bit weird about claiming the title for myself.
In my dozen years of paying city taxes in addition to state and national (do those count as dues?), I’ve seen it through a recession and a hurricane — and it’s seen me through my major life developments.
Until recently I thought that raising a family here was what gave me the most cred — after all, it’s when so many people jump ship for somewhere easier or more in line with the predominant vision of what raising children should look like. And even though my kids are indisputably New Yorkers, I wasn’t sure that being grandfathered in works in the opposite direction.
Through all of these changes, my partner and I kept choosing this place — in some cases, fighting to make it work. We chose it again these last few months — not only because we didn’t have anywhere else to go or to go easily, without risking or displacing others — but because, consistent with all of the other times we chose New York: this is our home.
The dream of being a New Yorker began for me on 9/11. Near the end of college and on the other side of the country, I started reading The New York Times to make sense of that awful tragedy. While I had been here as a tourist, I really began to learn about this city in those pages. I admired the resilience and ambition of a people who, by the luck of nature or their chosen nurture, more than survived — they succeeded.
The front page and Metro section led to Living and Arts, and oh how I lived for Thursday and Sunday Styles. I read online from California before online subscriptions were a thing and then became a Boston-based subscriber to the Sunday print edition and as such, my main religion became Modern Love.
The news led me to discover and appreciate New York-based fantasies — some historical and a bit more high brow with Wharton and Fitzgerald leading the way, and some more contemporary and sometimes decidedly less-so in the forms of Sex and the City, Cruel Intentions, Mad Men and yes, even Gossip Girl. These stories — journalistic and fantasy alike — fueled my desire to “be a part of it,” this otherworldly and magical place.
New Yorkers seemed to live their lives outside of the confines of their own space both literally — given how small apartments are — and more meaningfully, in the ways this city demands that you encounter different people and challenges the moment you step outside. The way it forces you to crowd into subway cars and the way that nearly knocking elbows with a stranger while dining in a restaurant isn’t a problem but actually part of the charm.
I recognize the irony that this period of isolation and confinement — while trapped inside with the least interaction I’ve ever had with other humans — is when I’ve finally been able to feel like I am this city and this city is me. But like Governor Cuomo said recently, we’ve been through hell together.
Many parts of this crisis were shared widely, no matter where you live— worrying about personal and collective health and safety, figuring out how to work from home while suddenly becoming a schoolteacher, feeling as though I’ve reached the end of Netflix, missing friends and family. The familiar list goes on.
But if am lucky enough to reach old age, what I will rattle on about this time will be distinctly New York memories — the time when this great city felt like a ghost town. About rushing the children to scooter quickly past refrigerated trucks outside of the hospital, hoping they wouldn’t ask about why they were there. About the eerily quiet days and nights where the only sounds from the typically cacophonous streets were ambulance sirens and birdsongs signaling the approach of springtime.
And of course, the nightly exception in the beautiful human symphony of applause and voices calling out from the windows in gratitude for all who kept our city alive — in so many ways — when it was literally dying.
Some are prematurely writing obituaries for the city or predicting an exodus given that we know now that we really can work-by-Zoom, save commute time and realize that it’s going to be a long time before the New York City we knew before the virus returns, if ever. And yet, I’m unfazed even as I’m not sure if or how we will continue to reside here given all the new and profound economic uncertainties.
But for however long I live, I will know that I made it here — through this most strange and trying time. And I feel certain now that I’ll make it anywhere.
Like a real New Yorker.
