A Look at the Last Days of Lockdown in New York City

A personal archive of a global pandemic that still feels like a nightmare. These are some scenes of the Big Apple juxtaposed with pre-pandemic times, a contrast we might never see again.

Around the end of May, I couldn’t take it anymore.

Before the world fell apart, it was still March, and I was into my sixth month of living in Washington, D.C. Everything was new and exciting. I moved there after spending a year of grad school + internship in New York City, where I had made friends whom I expected to see again throughout 2020. And then maybe in 2021 as well. We had been making plans, oh, so many plans.

But mid-March turned rapidly into hell. COVID-19 had started to leave distant China— distant for us in the Western Hemisphere—to knock on our doors. Chaos loomed over financial markets, borders were closed country after country, and we were bombarded by news about overcrowded hospitals and uncontrollable deaths in Europe. Friends of my friends in Europe started to get sick. In April, the pandemic had taken over the U.S., and then some of my friends here got sick (they all got better, fortunately). New York City was making headlines as the epicenter of the nation’s COVID-19 outbreak. ‘The City that Never Sleeps turned off its lights’, you would hear on TV, or something along those lines. The country… What am I saying? The world was in shock.