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NYC On A Saturday Afternoon In April 2020
This afternoon, I took a long walk around an empty Manhattan, smoking a cigar and maintaining a safe distance. (The cigar has that effect…) New Yorkers are already skilled at giving each other a wide berth.” A very wide berth.
Do the empty streets make you notice things you hadn’t noticed before?
Are any NYC leftwingers you know starting to get ancy about Cuomo?
Wait, you can walk around smoking a cigar in Manhattan?
Irony is that New Yorkers take crowded subways to arrive at empty places.
… filmed in black and white with minimal dialogue, Swedish or French subtitles, A Contagious Void.
That’s gonna make for some mighty short episodes of Cash Cab.
If you have a choice between a crowded subway or a car, which would you take, pandemic or no pandemic?
I think most people would opt for a car, either their own or a taxi/uber/lyft.
Why take public transit if you don’t have to?
Speaking as someone who was born and raised in Los Angeles
If you run into Inger Stevens and Harry Belafonte, my advice is to cross the street and keep moving.
Meanwhile tonight a bunch of drunken people decided to have a party in the middle of my street.
It reminds me a bit of an old post-apocalyptic movie from the 1950s; The World, the Flesh and the Devil. I haven’t seen it in years, so maybe I need to re-watch it now.
I just read your comment after posting mine about the same movie.
Its like rush hour in North Korea:
Reminds me of when I walked out of Battery Park City the day after 9/11. I had to go all the way to Penn Station (about 55 blocks). Everything south of 14th Street had been evacuated. Other than on West Street, where people were cheering out of town fire trucks, I only saw one person the entire way.
Block after block of nothing but empty. Eerie.
Except for you?
This sounds like a good story for its own post.
Lake Eerie
http://ricochet.com/372436/archives/witness-part-2/
Thank you. That was powerful.
I have been taking daily drives in my old classic car. Never stopping, just cruising country roads. When I mentioned this on Facebook I learned that if I don’t stay home, I’m a facist boot licker, who wants to kill other people.
My daughter has been taking drives. She takes her puppy. Calms them both down and brings them peace.
What a great idea!
Those pictures are eerie . . .
The Long View is the absolute best part of NR.
My daughter and I took advantage of the beautiful weather and went for a walk. Outdoor, woods-n-waters recreation (with social distancing and plenty of hand washing) has been specifically excluded from our governor’s Executive Order, so we could’ve gone fishing or canoeing or something, but we just walked. Saw a few neighbors out doing yard work, so we had joyful conversations from thirty feet away. A sheriff’s department cruiser went by, and we waved extravagantly to the deputy, who waved back. He did not stop to ask what we were doing—apparently, our governor has made that deeply unhelpful, mysteriously common threat of police action against those who break the new rules.
It’s idiotic—and, as one of our sheriffs has pointed out, unconstitutional. Good for him.
A friend came over to pick up the face masks I’d made for her—another chat across unnatural distance, but it’s better than nothing! A banner day!
Strange NYC street scenes.
I can almost see the Pacific Ocean out there, across the Hudson River behind those Rocky Mountain boulders…
It’s like waiting for Klaatu to show up……Did anyone catch the news story yesterday that they are sending troops into the bunker in Cheyenne Mountain – the big bunker??!! Stay safe and well.
Being outside can be dangerous. My wife was out cutting back Mexican Birds of Paradise and fell scratching her leg. Lovely weather in Tucson. Rain end of next week. I was disappointed that the governor did a “lock-down” order last week. Probably a lot of pressure from leftist Mayors like the loony Tucson Mayor. The lefties, all government employees with salaries unaffected, are demanding even more lock down.
I grew up in Forest Hills, but after I got married I lived on East 89th Street in Manhattan, just off of Madison Avenue. I used to love wandering around the city with my wife early on Sunday mornings when the streets looked a lot like your photos. I always had an aversion to crowds and crowded places which is why in slow stages my life has carried into rural Pierce County is Washington State. When I got out to Seattle in 1969, Boeing had just finished the laying off of nearly 100,000 workers. It those days we found a beachfront apartment the second day we were here. We lived there for five years. Seattle in those days was a paradise where you could walk along the sidewalk near Alki Point and hear the sound of your own footsteps. I seriously doubt that this current pandemic is going to significantly reduce the population as the Black Death did in Europe, but seeing scenes like your photos does, perhaps, give a sense of the world that the survivors of the plague must have seen when the dying ended and the world began to renew itself. As a mountain climber, I always sought out the places where I could get away, be free from the restrictions imposed by other people’s presence. Some days when I ride through the farm country surrounding my current home, it feels almost post apocalyptic with nobody in sight and no cars on the roads. I find that to be, like you photos, completely beautiful.
And Athwart. My wife goes to those two columns first.
Pima county has a whopping 11 deaths so far
time to hit the panic button
Its like a bar where no one knows your name.
My old office is hidden behind the Bank of America bldg. in that first shot:
One thing I’ve noticed — the farther west you go, the more desolate it is. Our new office is on 9th Ave and every time I’m standing outside of it, all I can hear is birds. I pick up a Citibike across from Penn Station and all I can hear is birds . . . and occasionally a fight going on in the “Village of the Damned” community that lives there, now. And all the way up to Columbus Circle and across town, it’s crazy-light traffic, until about Third Ave. Some days, if you don’t look closely at the shuttered storefronts, Second and Third Ave. look almost normal.
Well, “normal” for New York, I mean.
New York without New Yorkers . . . sounds like a step in the right direction