468 COVID-19: How New Yorkers Cope

BROWDERBOOKS

I have just signed with E.L. Marker, a hybrid offshoot of WiDo Publishing, to publish Forbidden Brownstones, the fifth title in my Metropolis series of historical novels set in nineteenth-century New York.  It will probably be published early next year.  "A hybrid?" you may ask. "What's that?"  It's a set-up where the author gets the services of an established small press for creating and marketing his book, but the author has full control.  This is what they offered, and it is just what I want.  My current small press will probably terminate me when the contracts for my two books expire on September 30, in which case  all rights will revert to me.  So be it; I'll make other arrangements.  But with a hybrid contract, no one can terminate me but me, myself, and that's now how I want it.  I have full control.  

Next: two more historical novels in the series, and then the big one: Metropolis (that word again!), a vast, sprawling, kaleidoscopic work, four novels in one, covering New York City from 1830 to 1880.  But don't hold your breath, as it may never get published, unless I publish it myself.  And will I even have time, given all my other projects?

I will soon do a media release announcing (at last!) my new website, with links to the most interesting (and sometimes controversial) posts in this blog over the years.

        COVID-19: How New Yorkers Cope

New Yorkers have always congregated on stoops and fire escapes, and in the street in front of their apartment building or home, to communicate.  In other words, to gossip, to chatter, to blab.  Not all New Yorkers, to be sure.  Nineteenth-century middle-class New Yorkers lived in handsome brownstones and would never have been caught sitting on their steep front stoops.  Those stoops set them off from the hoi polloi, and were to be used by family, visiting ministers, and other callers of distinction; tradesmen, deliverymen, and servants were relegated to the basement entrance beneath the stoop.  And all the other city residents?  They usually didn’t have stoops, but they communed on rooftops and later, once such fixtures were mandated, on fire escapes.

      When, en route to Europe, I first came to New York in September 1951, I walked west on West 43rd Street to the docks, to do some pre-voyage business with the French Line, whose pokey-slow liner the de Grasse would get me to Le Havre in less than record time.  Going down the street, I was amazed at the crowds of working-class women and their kids gathered on and near the stoops of the houses.  A child of the suburban Midwest, never had I seen so many people crowding around the entrance of a building.  And they were loud.  I recall one mother yelling to another that one of her kids was doing something he shouldn’t be doing, causing Mom to immediately intervene.  The husbands were of course at work.  And the fact that these residences had stoops bears witness to their having come down in the world.  In this neighborhood, at least, gone were the days when the middle class called them home.

      So the stoop and the nearby street have always been a part of New York living, and today they characterize both middle-class and working-class neighborhoods in all five boroughs.  But this is the time of COVID-19.  With the city in lockdown, and people in masks maintaining social distancing in fear of the virus, are the stoops and fire escapes and sidewalks deserted?  No way!  They are a vital part of New York living, and are chronicled as such in a two-page spread in the Sunday Times of June 14, 2020.  Featured are short accounts from all five boroughs of how New Yorkers of all classes are coping.  Specifically, how they are communicating with their neighbors.  For instance:

• Early April: a man living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on the second floor of a building facing Central Park West, chats from his window with friends passing by, including a gifted decorator, a cyclist who rides in the park, and a neighbor walking her dogs.  He also waves to a friend and her husband en route to Mount Sinai to give birth (it was a son).

• A Puerto Rican man living in the Port Morris section of the Bronx, near the Bruckner Expressway, reports hearing planes taking off from La Guardia Airport, and also steady traffic on the expressway in spite of the lockdown.  But he also hears his neighbors outside joking in Spanglish or salsa playing.

• St. George, Staten Island: A woman asks the couple next door if they need anything, and half-joking, tells them not to ask for toilet tissue.  Later that afternoon she finds on her stoop a six-pack of toilet tissue and two rolls of paper towels.  “We have extra,” her friends next door explain.

• Late April: A woman in Manhattan’s East Village lives in a deserted building, her neighbors having fled the city.  But when 7 p.m. comes and New Yorkers celebrate first responders by making noise or music from their front windows, she welcomes the music from a tenement across the street, and a sign that two women there hold up: HOW YOU DOIN'?  And when those windows go dark, she hears an electric guitar playing the Star-Spangled Banner, Jim-Hendrix style.

• A woman in Jamaica, Queens, tells how every day a bunch of men, a few masked but most of them maskless, gather on her block to drink beer and chain-smoke on the sidewalk in front of their building, leaving the pavement strewn with cigarette butts.  A few years ago their habitual catcalling so annoyed her that she confronted the main culprit, shook his hand, and asked him not to do it; after that he waved to her regularly and said hello.  Now, when she walks by the same bunch in a mask, one shouts, “Keep the corona away!” and then adds, “But have a Heineken.”

• A longtime super in a building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, tells how his building, once alive with baby showers, barbecues, and baptisms, is now strangely quiet, as the residents stay indoors. Most are undocumented immigrants who lost their full-time jobs and have trouble paying the rent.  But when a woman in her 70s gets sick, neighbors leave food by her front door.  “For undocumented people,” the super’s wife says, “there’s no stimulus package.”

• In a big housing project for low-income people in Red Hook, Brooklyn, the lockdown has made people tense.  Then a shipment of 20,000 pineapples from Costa Rica arrives, donated by a container terminal down the street.  Two women volunteers rent a U-Haul truck, load it with pineapples, and deliver them to nonprofits and low-income housing projects.  People respond with photos of themselves drinking piña coladas and pineapple tea.

• In Parkchester in the Bronx, a Latino piano player living in a two-story apartment building owned by his parents plays his piano on the front porch every morning at 11, after seniors’ privileged time at the local stores; even the mailman stops to listen.  There is no tip jar, so neighbors leave bottles of wine on the porch.

• In Manhattan’s Chinatown a volunteer neighborhood block association team of young men patrols on Mott Street as a deterrent to anti-Asian hate crimes.  Says one volunteer: “It’s good for the soul.”

• In Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, a third-generation Puerto Rican American and her children chalk inspirational messages on the of the stoop of  the house where she lives with her grandparents.  A photo shows the stoop and its messages:

HEY BROOKLYN

LET’S MAKE SURE

WE LISTEN, REFLECT

TEACH OUR YOUNG (AND OURSELVES)

KEEP A KIND HEART

JUST DO BETTER

IN DARKNESS WE TRANSFORM

IN LIGHT WE GROW

      After each rain, a new quote appears.  

• June: On 28th Street in Astoria, Queens, front-line workers and others gather every night on the street, masked, for a beer, a smoke, or a chat.  When a physical therapist tells of rotating  hospital patients on ventilators, a doctor hands her a loaf of homemade sourdough bread, and the therapist offers him some fresh-picked rhubarb.  Sharing experiences and food, they realize they’re all in this together, and prepare themselves for further challenges in their grinding daily work.

        So it goes in New York today.  I have ZOOMed now with friends three times, twice with New Yorkers and once even with friends in Lincoln, Nebraska: another way to communicate safely in the time of COVID-19.  And strangers in the street greet me and wish me a pleasant day -- normally unheard of in New York, where there are simply too many strangers to acknowledge.  But this is different: we're all in it together.  New Yorkers are coping, and so, I'm sure, is everybody else.

Source Note:  The content of the preceding 
post is drawn from the article "There Stays the Neighborhood" in the Metropolitan Section of the  New York Times of Sunday, June 14, 2020.

Coming soon:  In all the world's art, myth, and literature, by my count there are only five basic stories, maybe six, endlessly repeated with variations.  Can you guess them?

©  2020  Clifford Browder