How a City Comes Back to Life

When the city shut down more than a year ago, a walker within it could track the oncoming withdrawal and hibernation, block by block, and even—as people walking dogs moved farther away from each other—tautening leash by tautening leash. Birdland Jazz Club, open on a mid-March Monday night, with a singer nervously bathing his hands in Purell, had closed a week later. Grand Central Terminal, still busy as that weekend began, was nearly empty by the following Tuesday. Much of what was taken for granted then—the breezy confidence that life would be normal again by, well, maybe June?—has faded from memory. Adjusting to the unprecedented, we have instant amnesia for the unimaginable. So much that seemed impossible has happened, and yet as each thing happened it registered as merely the next thing happening. Broadway had never before closed for a year, not even during the 1918 pandemic; the mask mandates, even then, were not so extensive. No schools, no clubs, no gyms, no “indoor dining” (a term that, like “unsafe sex” and “analog watch,” turned an age-old default into a special condition)—we accepted it and went on. The shutdown was like the closing iris at the end of a Chaplin film, less and less of the outside world peeking out through the aperture of sight each day.

The reopening, promoted by falling COVID case numbers and rising vaccination rates, seemed to have happened over a similar weekend, in May. But it felt less like an iris closing and more like a flower blooming in time-lapse photography. The same time span felt faster, like an explosion rather than like a declension. Emergence may or may not be a stronger natural force than entropy, but we favor it emotionally. We mourn for the thing coming down, and root for the one going up.

Much of the emotion is like what must be felt at the end of a tsunami: the great wave came, washed over everything, and now has pulled back and we can inspect the beach. What has survived and what has not? Many familiar things have shuttered: a Persian restaurant here, a much loved stationery store there. We can wonder which temporary closings will truly be reversed. Will the Oyster Bar in Grand Central ever open again? What about the Tenth Street Russian & Turkish Baths, an institution apparently dating back to the nineteenth century? Even the most thoroughly vaccinated New Yorkers may not soon want to test their immunity in the conditions of thigh-to-thigh contact with heavily sweating, seventy-something men.

Walking through the Lower East Side, one sees that Economy Candy, in operation since 1937, remains closed for browsing, with candy available for pickup and delivery only. But a block away, at Orchard Corset—in place for the past century—the owner sits inside, as he has for as long as anyone can remember, as though waiting for the ghost of a chorus girl fresh from the Ziegfeld Follies to walk in and demand a bone-ribbed corset and camiknickers. (Orchard Corset, with its unchanging display of lingerie, has one of the two most hallucinatorily persistent window displays in town, the other being that of Wankel’s Hardware, on upper Third Avenue, where a variety of rotating fans and dehumidifiers are placed in the window bedecked and beribboned like prize show dogs. Wankel’s survived the tsunami, too.) Katz’s Deli still sports the same slogan, “Send a Salami to your boy in the army,” long after the original salamis and boys in the Army have passed.

Other places feel weirdly reanimated. The “Twilight Zone” quality that many observed in Times Square at the height of the pandemic has shifted into something more like—well, a “Twilight Zone” episode in which everyone, aside from one B-actor, forgets that a pandemic just killed tens of thousands of people and shut down the city for a year. (“Am I the only one who remembers?” William Shatner would shout, in closeup.) Madison Avenue in midtown, the most emotively inert part of the city, now almost elicits our compassion. Up and down the avenue, once the swanky street for high-end headquarters, one “Entire Premises for Rent” sign after another clamors for attention.

As a walker slows and settles, scene by scene, into specific places, the new stirrings often seem much like the old stirrings. “All our reflections turn about,” Auden wrote at a moment of similar trauma and reflection, in 1940. “A common meditative norm. / Retrenchment, Sacrifice, Reform.” Retrenchment, sacrifice, and reform didn’t happen then, and seem unlikely to happen on a grand scale now. But smaller significant struggles take place, and one is to begin commingling again with other people—finding ways, after more than a year when the rule was to minimize human contact, to return to common spaces. What we call culture is basically the act of sharing air with strangers. Restaurants, theatres, small stores and large ones, concert venues—all are reopening, and, like victims of a traumatic injury relearning the steps that once seemed second nature, we are remembering how to dance.

Outside Johnson’s BBQ, on East 163rd Street, in the Bronx, two innocent strangers approached Dwayne Johnson, the owner of the famous soul-food kitchen. “You’re waking up an old man—making him work!” he pretended to complain, but then he got behind the counter and began to make up enormous containers of collard greens and yams and what many agree are the best ribs in the city, or at least the borough.

East 163rd Street is an almost perfect picture of a typical New York street as those streets actually exist now: a Chinese restaurant, already closed at 6 p.m.; a bodega, advertising lotto tickets on the awning; a dry cleaner; several locals in chairs taking the air; and trash bags—one of the great unspoken issues in the mayoral election—piled on the street corner.

Johnson’s BBQ, takeout only, has been in place and in the family since 1954, when it was opened by James and Pauline Johnson. The son took a brief detour to work at I.B.M. after playing basketball at Lee College, in Texas, but thought better of it. Now, at sixty-three, his hair frosted with white, he is thinking of handing the place over to the next generation. He covered huge platters of ribs with his patented mustard sauce, a bright, vibrant, tangy liquid. (“You can put it on anything. Fish, chicken, whatever. Order someone else’s food and put it on, and you’re eating Johnson’s.”)

Johnson’s is a small hangout with a big reputation—“Every rapper in the Bronx has eaten here”—and fills up with locals throughout the day. Johnson’s father and mother opened the restaurant together, but “it was my mother really pushed this business,” he explained. “Always cooked in here, dealt with the help. My father owned the building, but everybody that grew up here thought—well, they knew—who the founder was.” At one point, he said, the Johnsons had three restaurants. “Here, then one on Prospect, and one on Morris Avenue. We served fish and oxtail and pigs’ feet and ham hocks on Morris Avenue. The one on Prospect Avenue—that had sit-down, fifteen to twenty seats.”

These days, Johnson concentrates on pork ribs and fried chicken; his secret is to season the ribs after they’ve marinated in vinegar, and then apply his special mustard sauce, which he hopes to put on the retail market soon. He is proud of his sides: “Rice and black-eyed peas, collard greens, candied yams, and potato salad. Sauce and juice in there, and the juice from the ribs.” Famously loquacious—“People I know, I like to welcome them”—he has to keep his daughter and his nephew by the counter on most days when there’s a line. He hopes to leave the restaurant to both of them within the next couple of years.

In summer months, the line outside can be long, and over the years the Johnson family has funnelled the line outside on the street into the store. This made social-distancing adjustments for takeout during the pandemic tricky. Even as the line stretched down 163rd Street, the Johnsons tried to keep people moving. Now customers, while still socially distanced, are creeping together—“Inch by inch,” Johnson said, “they’re getting closer.” There is often someone inside holding forth on general topics: today, a Latino singer had a long, complex story to tell about playing with Miles Davis once upon a time in another place.

The restaurant not only stayed open right through the pandemic; in Johnson’s view, the pandemic was one more flood that tried to drown him out and failed. “We never closed,” he said. “We never came near closing. In fact, business has been good. Business has been great. Business could not be better. Life changes, but we remain.”

The city’s soul feeds on more than food, though, and for many nothing has been more apprehensively anticipated than the return of what might be called the spraying arts. The local specialty of standup comedy, in particular, depends on truly intimate address, performers acting as a human fountain of saliva: if the cone of aerosols could be filmed in raking light, we would see an audience put into contact with whatever was being sprayed.

On a recent Monday night in Gowanus, Brooklyn standup was coming back to life in a show at Littlefield, a former warehouse on Sackett Street. It’s not quite a comedy club in the old-fashioned Seinfeldian sense, but more like a rock venue where self-produced shows go on, in this case under the direction of Jeremy Levenbach, who brings in a local lineup of rising comics.

Sabrina Wu, a standup herself, was on her way to Littlefield to welcome the return of Brooklyn comedy, and struggling to explain to a newcomer the specifics of Brooklyn standup style, which either is or is not—or is sort of but not really—distinct from the Manhattan kind. Often, she said, “the punch line isn’t literally the words being said but about a point of view. It’s about the beat after the joke.”

Wu—“Obviously Asian, also gay, so everyone just thinks I come from California,” though she hails from Michigan—has, at twenty-three, already landed an agent and a seat in a writing room. But her life lies in standup, where she has a lot to say about the triangular complications of being Asian, American, and gay. In high school, in Ann Arbor, she explains in one of her standup bits, she was a surprisingly successful basketball star, and was entered in a newspaper contest for the outstanding player. “To get the greatest number of votes, my mom took that article and posted it on WeChat,” Wu recounted. “I went viral in China. ‘There’s a Chinese girl who’s good at basketball in America!’ I won, but they were suspicious: the second-place girl had six hundred votes, and I had two hundred thousand votes.”

Heading down Fifth Avenue in Park Slope toward Littlefield, Wu mused about the challenges of making it in standup: “The ladder has more first rungs than before, but a much less direct climb upwards, I think.” Where a West Harlem kid like George Carlin could, half a century ago, consciously plot a standup career, from night clubs to talk shows and sitcom appearances, the ascendant path is now more open in the first steps—open-mike shows abound, and TikTok and YouTube and Twitter build reputations—while the higher steps are clouded in mist. One performer at Littlefield that evening, Ian Lara, a thirty-year-old self-described Afro-Latino comic (“We’re, like, the next big thing”), recalled a 2019 appearance that he made on the “Tonight Show.” “People tell me that if I had done what I did on the ‘Tonight Show’ twenty years ago my career would have exploded. Now it just kind of leaked out onto YouTube,” he said.

The proliferation of comedy shows and platforms even amid the pandemic means that most of the younger standups, who might once have been introduced as “having just come back from the Comic Strip in Columbus, Ohio,” are tonight more often introduced as writers—for “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” or a Comedy Central series. Yet the customs of New York standup turn out to be oddly constant, in and out of pandemics, boroughs, and decades. There is a stool on the stage, a microphone on a stand—standups still don’t use lapel mikes. They still wear sneakers. There is still the obvious difference in delivery when the comic moves from repeating What Worked Before to What I’m Trying Out Now. These performers hibernated through the past fourteen months, and here they are.

The audience members seemed more uncertain than the comics about what their role ought to be. Outside the entrance, on an industrial Brooklyn street two blocks from the notoriously foul Gowanus Canal, the now familiar rituals of temperature-taking and vaccine avowal had already taken place. Once inside, seated not at tables but in neat, slightly distanced rows of chairs, about half the audience kept their masks on, and about half didn’t. Later, the pair of host comics muttered something about everyone being vaccinated, and this seemed probable, but a slight air of unease still ruffled the cautious crowd. Loud laughter seemed permissible; the wild release of a normal comedy show, not. And the customary piccolo tremolo that used to run above the crowd noise of every comedy club—the excess laughter of the one drunk and slightly hysterical patron—had no purchase or possibility here. The laughter was more tentative than confident. It is easier to thaw out as a performer than it is to thaw out as an audience.

The performers’ jokes were pandemic-inflected rather than pandemic-centered. The comedian Natasha Vaynblat talked about getting back on the subway: “The subway is not an overpriced, unreliable mode of transportation. What the subway actually is is an incredibly affordable, year-round haunted hayride.” The everyday experience looked different now. “Randomly, you’ll find yourself stalled in pitch-black darkness. Performers will lunge at you from every corner. You’ll find yourself sitting in a mysterious substance. You’re, like, what is that?” Vaynblat also worried about the potential embarrassment of bringing pandemic-lockdown habits to the office: “While working from home, as soon as my brain says it’s time to go to the bathroom I immediately start taking off my pants. . . . At home, that’s efficient. At the office, that’s indecent exposure.”

There were many jokes born of the months of isolation. “The most exciting thing that’s happened to me in the past year is that a friend texted me that she had a sexy dream that I appeared in,” the sweetly nebbishy comic Josh Gondelman said. “It felt good to get out of the house, even if it was in someone else’s mind.” But there was little comedy about the more immediate experience of the pandemic—about fear, or illness, or exhaustion, or even masking and distancing protocols. What happened during the months of shutdown, it seemed, was less incubation than hibernation—less new ideas and attitudes germinating than pent-up energies and habits preparing to rear back. Here was the simple mechanics of a jack-in-the-box—hold down the lid long enough and, no matter when you let it go, the toy springs right up.

Ian Lara, in Wu’s judgment, was one of the standouts of the evening. Working with an easy, intelligent street style that recalls the young Chris Rock, he was born and bred in Brooklyn, and sat out the pandemic in Queens; he even wore a Mets cap while he performed.

After his set, Lara reflected that there were few good or fresh takes left about the pandemic: “And, yeah, I know the pandemic just ended. See, I don’t have a story to tell that you don’t know. You’d think, Well, that makes it ‘universal,’ or whatever. But not really. If I’m talking about a breakup, maybe five people in the audience have just had a breakup, and the other people are curious about breakups. I have news. But nobody wants to hear about the pandemic. They feel they know it. The shelf life is very short.”

Still, Lara said, “some things work. A simple, silly one that I’ve been opening with is finding out about red wine during the pandemic. I turned thirty during the pandemic, and I’ve always heard people, women, speak about red wine: ‘I wanna go home and have a glass of red wine.’ See, I was never home, worked at night, and advertising about having a glass of wine going home aren’t usually directed to Black men. When the pandemic broke and I was home, I had to try this out . . . and I became a red-wine drinker. My Friday night was, take a bath and have a glass of red wine. I’m late to the game. But it made me think I don’t understand why rappers promote alcohol but not red wine. That’s the alley it took me down. Rappers always promote alcohol like tequila and vodka. But if you listen to their lyrics they’re very emotional. That doesn’t sound like a tequila drunk. It sounds like a red-wine drunk. So I have to ask, Have you guys really been drinking Malbec?” He paused. “Rappers on red wine. That’s one of the few pandemic jokes that works.”

Lara had a hard pandemic. Many members of his family fell ill and an uncle died. But he never doubted the city’s resilience. “It doesn’t even seem there was a transition—it’s like a switch flipped and New York was open again, from one night to the next,” he said. “What I don’t get is people saying New Yorkers are rude and arrogant. When the pandemic hit, we stood in our little one-bedroom apartments and didn’t go out. We did it for society. It’s funny, I had some road work during the pandemic, and, when I travelled in the cities that have these huge homes with land and pools, they’re, like, ‘We can’t stay indoors!’ New Yorkers sat in one-bedroom apartments for a year and just said, ‘O.K.’ We got hit the hardest, and I kept hearing, ‘New York is dead.’ I was just, like, ‘Of course New York will bounce back.’ This is not like some . . . pop-up city that’s just becoming trendy.”

Of all the arts, singing is perhaps the most ominous to an epidemiologist. In that imaginary diagram of aerosolization, a comic would be expelling dribble, but a fine, full-out singer would be a toxic fountain, misting the virus deep into the tenth row. (One of the first documented superspreading events in this country involved a choir rehearsal.) Singers wondered for a desolate year if they would ever return to work. Plexiglas shields and distanced audiences have been tried, but the real cabaret night-club experience—the singer there, turning emotion into vocalese; you here, receiving the fluttering air and translating it back into emotion—had been denied.

The experiment was at last being tried on a Saturday night at a previously obscure club, the Green Room 42, hidden away on top of a Times Square hotel. Alice Ripley, the Tony-winning star of “Next to Normal,” was coming back to sing with a small, Carole King-style band of piano and acoustic guitar. It was not exactly a return to tradition, however. Where once at the Copacabana or the El Morocco there were ashtrays and de-facto dress codes, with Walter Winchell making mordant notes and cancelling careers, the crowd tonight, mostly in the new uniform of shorts and T-shirts and baseball caps, was ushered in two by two, all masked, and placed in strict semicircles around naked tables. There would be no water, no drinks, and no food; the masks were to stay on all the time. (A few rebels in the back lowered theirs.)

And then the air-conditioning collapsed, defeated by the late-spring humidity: the people packed inside and facing the musicians in front were not merely perspiring but in many cases gasping for water, or relief. The experience had less the feeling of a New York cabaret than of a life raft with night-club tables on it, set adrift on the ocean, with the suffering audience waving ripped shirts at distant ships.

Yet when Alice Ripley came out and began to sing, with her big, belting voice, the atmosphere altered. Ripley, dressed in a pink gown and sneakers, was perspiring and making jokes about it. But within five minutes her devotees were en extase, applauding, cheering, living again.

Ripley is the kind of performer who violates the basic premises of her craft with such authenticity that you start to doubt the premises, not the violations. Instead of singing familiar chanteuse numbers, Gershwin and Kern, she sings pop power ballads of the eighties and nineties—Phil Collins songs, Foreigner songs—which she treats as though they were by Harold Arlen. Hearing “I Wanna Know What Love Is” sung as though it might be “Last Night When We Were Young” is an education in creative transformation. Ripley turned James Taylor’s “Your Smiling Face”—“Whenever I see your smiling face / I have to smile myself”—into a kind of tribute to what she expected to be the unmasked moment, which she saw, looking out, hadn’t quite arrived.

All the same, nobody ducked or avoided her as she sang. People seemed to bathe in the common sweat and spit. Where the comedy audience felt still halfway in the unease of the pandemic, the cabaret audience, despite the pandemic precautions weighing on their pleasures, was just done with it. They were an audience kept from being an audience, dreaming of being an audience again. When Ripley performed, phones flared on, hands were clasped, tears fell, applause greeted even the bridges of songs. Couples who had never met before had been placed alongside one another, in the thrifty New York way, and forced—still masked and without the small protective armor of a glass with a drink in it—to acknowledge their too-present presence. But the music brought everyone together, on one beat, and tables danced—the upper bodies danced, at least—in unison. Often, it seemed as if every couple at every table were watching the show through their iPhone cameras, listening to Alice even as they kept Alice for later, for good.

“It used to bother me,” she said afterward. “Now I just hope that when they put it on YouTube I look O.K.” Ripley regarded this night in the spirit of a preview, rather than an opening. “I guess I’m still singing to masks,” she said. “Soon, the air-conditioner will be working. Soon, you will be allowed to drink water. We’ve come a long way, with theatre. But it’s been so strange, this weekend, the way everything just hatched. All these people! It’s as if they all just popped out of little cocoons.” (Since her performance, the Green Room 42 has begun serving food and drinks, and vaccinated concertgoers can go maskless.)

Ripley described the experience of walking through Times Square when the city was largely shut down: “It was a cardboard cutout, a piece of scenery. We lost an ice-cream place—I felt that it’s my personal duty to eat as much ice cream as I could. People asked, Why are we trying to save a restaurant? But it’s not a restaurant—it’s kind of like a church.” The gospel of resilience was very much on her mind. “The one good thing we singers all learned is that we have to make our own music,” she went on. “We were so dependent before! Waiting for bookings, for someone to smile. For a year, we sang for each other on StreamYard”—Zoom for performers, basically—“and we learned, hey, we can always book ourselves.”

At the end of the evening, the audience filed out, masks still on, eyes alight with elation at having finally heard a show. Outside, on Tenth Avenue, from Forty-second Street right up to Fifty-seventh, every seat in every outdoor dining shed seemed taken, an uninterrupted vista of bare faces feeding.

A discarded mask looks eerily like a dead rat—at least if it is black and has long ties and has been thrown aside on the paths of a park. The city bicyclist, racing around the Central Park loop, closed to car traffic now for years, sees a cast-off mask ahead and swerves. The road is suddenly filled with these discarded masks, as though people, having been told that they were not absolutely essential, made a chorus-line gesture of tossing them extravagantly aside, in some common ecstatic striptease of relief. The repopulation of the parks by raccoons and other, less romantic rodents was an easily overlooked story of the pandemic, though it seemed rare for any New Yorker, in any borough, not to report an alarmingly close encounter with a budget-sized creature roaming through bonus-sized trash bags, apparently brought about by the combination of more trash and fewer people on the streets. This made the confusion of abandoned masks with run-over rodents worryingly plausible.

The “great bike boom” was a happier feature of the pandemic year; the count of bicycle usage (and rentals, and sales, and thefts) multiplied. It wasn’t just a bike boom, though: the Central Park circuit got crowded with e-bikes and motorized scooters, not to mention those weird balance-beam motorized unicycles. The pandemic seemed to double the self-propelled traffic in the Park, and has brought to mind Winslow Homer’s Civil War-era woodblock prints of mobs of New Yorkers on skates tripping over other New Yorkers.

We’re reminded that the city got turned inside out during the past year, in the specific sense that sidewalk dining and parkgoing became central to urban life; the outdoors became indoors, and the indoors outdoors. This may have extended past recreation into the more hazily poetic sense that the first became last and the last first—with an altered sense of who was and was not an essential worker, and what was and was not essential work. It is hard to turn a city inside out without turning its citizens’ consciousness around, too. We did not change our lives, but the hope persists that, by redefining our space, we may yet remake our essence.

And yet the ebbing pandemic leaves in its wake a curious absence of exultation. “Absence of Exultation” could indeed be as much the motto of the reopening as “Abundance of Caution” was of the closing. The end of plagues in great cities has sometimes been celebrated by erecting buildings—as with the most beautiful Baroque church in the world, the Santa Maria della Salute, in Venice. In New York, no one would expect Baroque exuberance in architectural form, but we might seek more in behavior.

Yet the overcharge of information that governs our time—the knowledge of variants and mutations that previous generations who suffered worse plagues than ours were unaware of—has left us with the permanent jumps. And so our deliverance feels merely like a detour. Exultation in our time is a private emotion, shared at most with a room full of perspiring cabaret enthusiasts. “Glad to be alive” is perhaps the loudest form it can decently take, and surreptitiously throwing aside a mask in the park may be the one satisfying ritual that the ending offers.

“We note the signs of better times, slyly, as a mother notes the progress of a child,” E. B. White wrote cautiously in another turnaround summer, that of 1934. “We see cafés overflowing, hotels gay again.” And he added, “Essentially, the American depression was not a plague, scourging and chastening the people, but a problem in bookkeeping, irritating and unbalancing them. Its most notable effect was the election of a President who would be glad to redistribute wealth if there were any way, constitutionally.” Our great change, the pandemic, was a problem not in bookkeeping but in public health, which could be resolved by a solution in public health, and produced its own kind of unexpected politics, which may or may not be sustained.

On East 163rd Street, Dwayne Johnson packed another Styrofoam box of ribs and greens, added mustard sauce, and then placed it inside a black plastic bag. Like many small food merchants, he is dealing with a sudden rise in the cost of wholesale goods. “Three months ago, it was two dollars and five cents for a pound of ribs—today, three dollars and forty-five cents,” he said. “When the pandemic started, it went from one-eighty-nine, to two-twenty-five, then it came back down to two-oh-five. It’s supply and demand. Eventually, when things come down, it will come round.”

What hasn’t changed is his hours. “I’m always here from 8 a.m. to nine-thirty at night. It’s my choice to hang around. I love this neighborhood. It took care of me and my family for sixty-seven years. I have the responsibility to show the young people you have choices.” He added, “My father gave me the building, not just the business. You have to do that in the city, own the building to keep the business.”

On a whiteboard near the cash register, his daughter Stacia likes to write timely maxims and aphorisms, which she changes every day. A typical one might read, “Detachment is power: release all things and people that no longer serve you.” Highest and seemingly most recent on the current list is “The good always outweighs the bad,” and then, beside it, almost as an afterthought, a small salute: “Thank God.” ♦