Coronavirus in NYC: Eerie Streetscapes Are Stripped of Commerce

New York City’s new face under the coronavirus showed itself under bright, blue skies Saturday. It was a shuttered streetscape stripped of commerce and the jangled rhythms of footfalls, honking horns and even people’s voices, a scene that might follow a blizzard, overlaid on a cool spring day.

Some New Yorkers ventured out from isolation, alone or in twos or threes, for a peek around, filling the stillness with their own narrations on a city’s mood.

“It makes people closer in a way,” said one woman, Susan Duncan, in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as she watched the unspoken choreography of people swerving to make room for one another.

“There is kind of a warm feeling about that,” Duncan said.

But in nearby Williamsburg, Jeannie McAuley, 44, found the quiet left her in the company of her own cloud-covered thoughts. “With fewer people around, it builds the anxiety,” she said.

A trickle of visitors approached the Sept. 11 memorial and its reflecting pools, perhaps seeking solace during a crisis without precedent by remembering the recovery from another. Greenwich Village, normally thrumming with tourists and the young brunch-set on a given weekend, now looked as if from a bygone era.

“In the ’50s, it was like this,” said Colin Ryan, 68, an on-and-off Village lifer and denizen, scanning the handfuls of couples and children in Washington Square Park where there used to be a crush of musicians, performers and university students.

“They were all families,” he said. “We were all schoolchildren.”

The stillness played out beneath the relentless clamor of the unnerving news. The Federal Emergency Management Agency issued a major disaster declaration for the state of New York, giving the state access to billions of dollars of relief funds as the number of residents testing positive for the coronavirus raced past the 10,000 mark without sign of slowing.

With 6% of the U.S. population, New York now accounts for nearly half of the country’s cases . And the city’s hospitals are expressing growing alarm about shortages of critical supplies, including masks and ventilators.

On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a sweeping edict meant to compel New Yorkers to stay indoors as much as possible, ordering all nonessential businesses to keep their workers home.

Mass transit will keep running, but people should not use it unless they absolutely must. Roads will remain open, but nonessential gatherings of any size for any reason are banned.

Cuomo’s edict takes effect Sunday at 8 p.m., but the impact of a series of earlier restrictions that closed restaurants, bars and other businesses was already clear Saturday.

With far more people indoors than on a typical weekend day, the emptiness outdoors presented itself in surprising ways.

A drive through Manhattan was shockingly swift at midday; no traffic, no tourist buses, no tourists. It was the sort of fantasy New York that New Yorkers dream about, with endless street parking and no selfie sticks in sight, but this one with a cost: nothing to do.

“It’s a beautiful spring day,” said Missy Corcoran of the Village, walking her dog with her husband and child. “We’re just not able to really enjoy it.”

In Central Park, a barefoot martial arts master, Derrick Williams, 62, led two young pupils through their poses with stern counsel.

“You’ve got to work hard and work smart,” he told them. “This ain’t no joke.”

He paused and thought about the city surrounding them.

“We are off balance,” he said. “Bottom line is, everyone is scattered around. Stop, find your balance, and once you find your balance, you’ll be able to ease through all.”

Elsewhere, outdoor life seemed to thrive in ways that, given the constant reminders for social distancing, seemed reckless.

The crowds at the farmers market in Union Square were the size of a pre-coronavirus weekend, with shoppers at one another's elbows.

Some neighborhoods in Queens and the Bronx showed similar robust outings. And like Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park remained an outdoor respite for people with nowhere else to go for fresh air.

In Harlem, the busy churches announced the cancellation of services Sunday. A handwritten sign outside one church read “May God be with you!!”

Jamie Burgos, a truck driver scrubbing his Honda Civic at a car wash in East Williamsburg — his wife and child would not get out of the vehicle — said he yearned for his Pentecostal church for comfort, but it was closed.

“I need God,” he said. “I pray for my family, my house, my neighborhood, the world.”

In Ridgewood, Queens, a musician, Sean O’Hara, 26, said he had been coughing more — not because he was ill but because he had been smoking too many cigarettes in his newfound idle time.

“I think I’d be OK if I got sick,” he said. “I just want to look past my own petty personal hangups. I think it’s bigger than myself. What about our society?”

And on Harlem’s 116th Street, a man and a woman, friends, stopped to greet one another on the sidewalk, leaving space between them that once would have seemed odd.

“I’m happy to see you,” the man said. “I wish I could give you affection.” And he walked away.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .