28 newyork| october12–25, 2020
The Panic
Attackof
thePower
Brokers
ByAndrewRice
O
ne late-august morning,
I met former New York gover-
nor Eliot Spitzer at Hudson
Yards, the lavishly subsidized
$25 billion real-estate develop-
ment that will one day house
Facebook offices, investment
funds, and the pharmaceutical
firm Pfizer. I found him at the
base of an unfinished skyscrap-
er, where a marketing banner
draped across the scaffolding
read reset expectations.
Spitzer was wearing a mask, a green
gingham shirt, and bookish horn-rimmed
glasses. The former governor is now a
builder, having returned to his family’s real-
estate business after self-destructing in
politics. He had been talking to me inter-
mittently since the middle of the summer,
analyzing the pandemic as someone with a
deep personal investment in the health of
the city. “I don’t know when people are
coming back to these buildings,” Spitzer
said as we strolled north toward the siteof
a mixed-use project he is constructingin
partnership with the Related Companies,
the main developer of Hudson Yards. “At
first, the optimists were saying, ‘This willbe
a three-week shutdown, and by Labor Day
it will be back to normal.’ ” Now the emer-
gency evacuation had settled into a stateof
semi-permanent dispersal.
That day, the city would record just 281
cases of covid-19, close to its low sincethe
pandemic began, and life in the city’s resi-
dential neighborhoods had returnedtoa
pleasant rhythm, with people dining on
the sidewalks and Instagramming sunsets
in the park. But the whirring core of Man-
hattan still felt weird and abandoned. It
was a little before 11 a.m. on a weekday,
and there was not a single office worker in
sight. Chairs were stacked on tables inside
the Maison Kayser sandwich shop at Hud-
son Yards, where a sign on the door read
closed until further notice. The
chain was bankrupt. So was Neiman Mar-
cus, which had recently announced itwas
abandoning the 50-year lease on the
department store it had just opened inthe
Hudson Yards mall. Only 8 percentof
Manhattan’s 1 million office workers were
now estimated to be back at their desks,
compared with 20 or 25 percent in other
U.S. metro areas. Around Times Square,
where almost a quarter of the retail loca-
tions were available for lease this spring,
disorder and vagrancy had crept into the
negative space.
The present crisis encompasses aspects
of every challenge New York has faced in
recent memory. Like Sandy, it is a natural
disaster. Like the 2008 financial crisis, it
has caused a surge in unemployment and
Photographs by Matthew Porter
DEPARTURE 2020
THE CITY’S
“ ERMANENT
OVERNMENT”
HAS ALWAYS
UILT ITS WAY
OUT OF CRISIS.
BUT WHAT
IF IT CAN’T?
