12 THENEWYORKER,MARCH8, 2021
SKYLINEPOSTCARD
HUNGARIANHUSTLE
F
our years ago, during a three-month
artist’s residency in Brooklyn, Andi
Schmied, a photographer from Buda-
pest, visited the Empire State Building
and was surprised to see so many taller
skyscrapers. She immediately wanted
to shoot photos from their top floors,
but she quickly learned that these glass
minarets were mostly new luxury resi-
dences—private in the extreme. “What
is my way to get in?” she wondered.
Schmied, then thirty, decided to im-
personate a prospective buyer or renter,
a Hungarian billionaire named Gabri-
ella Schmied. (Gabriella is her middle
name, so her passport sufficed as I.D.)
To fill the role of husband, she recruited
a friend from Budapest, an art and book
dealer named Zoltan. She worked up a
backstory: Gabriella, architect, moving
to the States with toddler son, owing to
Zoltan’s work. She invented an imagi-
nary assistant named Coco, blew her
art-residency materials budget on a cred-
ible outfit, made a list of fancy buildings,
and, with the selling agents demonstrat-
ing no real inclination for due diligence,
bluffed her way into some of the plan-
et’s loftiest, most expensive apartments.
By this point, of course, the under-
taking had grown into an art project,
and an anthropological investigation.
She recorded her interactions with the
Realtors on her phone and shot inten-
tionally unartful photos on a Nikon
F-601—for the absentee husband’s ben-
efit, of course. The transcripts and pic-
tures would become the basis of an ex-
hibit and a lavish yet mischievous book
called “Private Views: A High-Rise
Panorama of Manhattan,” published in
December by VI PER, a gallery in Prague.
“Most of these viewings were like the-
atrical scenes for me,” she said the other
day, from Budapest. Many of them are
reproduced in the text. “Sit down, Gabri-
ella. It is really a moment for you,” an
agent says, at one boxy high-rise. “Imagine
I am not here. Imagine your son running
around, saying words in Hungarian....
Imagine the smell of your favorite food
going through the apartment, from the
kitchen to the dining room; perhaps a
goulash. Your maid would be getting
ready with dinner, while you are just hav-
ing one of the finest French champagnes
in the soaking tub with your husband.”
(Schmied: “You don’t even have to
try to convince me.”)
When she returned to New York a
year ago, just before the world shut down,
to hit the remaining buildings on her list,
she brought along Zoltan. At a tower
overlooking Central Park, an agent, fig-
uring that Zoltan, as a man, would know
his wines, said, “My husband loves
duck.... Usually, we do Burgundy duck
breast or a lamb chop, and we have it with
red wine like Bordeaux. He loves that.”
Zoltan: “Who doesn’t?”
No one, Schmied said, ever seemed
to suspect a thing. She acted naturally,
for the most part, and gave her sincere
opinions. She learned as she went—
staging, airspace, Marni—and sharp-
ened her act. She became a connoisseur
of what she calls “convincing tactics.”
“‘Timeless yet contemporary’: this
expression, whatever the hell it means,
I heard in every single apartment,” she
said. “The agents try to make the buyer
feel that this apartment is the most
unique thing you’ve ever seen. Every-
thing is ‘handcrafted’ or ‘hand-selected,’
but the fact is these apartments are all
the same.” Just about every one had, as
its crowning indulgence, a soaking tub
in front of a floor-to-ceiling window.
The view, always stunning, even when
it was obscured by clouds, often con-
tained other new luxury towers, but the
agents never called attention to them.
They spoke of the Chrysler Building
and the Empire State, or the fact that
because you are eligible to get a vaccine
in New York, it doesn’t mean that you
are eligible in Massachusetts or Geor-
gia. A contentious issue is whether pri-
oritizing K-12 teachers should be a re-
quirement for reopening schools; they
are eligible for vaccines in about thirty
states, and only in certain counties in
some others. If you are eligible, you still
often need a lot of spare time and tech-
nical access to secure an appointment.
Racial and class inequities abound, along
with a certain arbitrariness. Yet, look-
ing only at the raw numbers, people in
the U.S. are being vaccinated at almost
twice the rate of those in Germany. (And
both the U.S. and Germany are in a
better position, in terms of supplies,
than much of the developing world.)
One measure of how tricky it can be
to think about the pandemic’s next chap-
ter is the discussion around “vaccine
passports.” The idea is that a person’s
vaccine status—perhaps documented by
an app—could open doors that would
otherwise be closed. But which doors?
Showing proof of vaccination before
travelling to another country is a fa-
miliar practice. Difficulties arise over
access to jobs and whether vaccinated
people should be encouraged to act as
if COVID-19 is no longer a factor—to go
to big indoor weddings, crowded the-
atres, busy restaurants—when vaccines
are not universally available and vacci-
nated people may still spread the dis-
ease, albeit to a lesser extent.
Conversely, some worry that down-
playing what vaccines can do might fur-
ther people’s reluctance to get one. (Vac-
cine hesitancy is a concern; a third of
the members of the military who have
been offered a vaccine have turned it
down.) In that sense, the vaccines high-
light, rather than eliminate, a central di-
lemma of this brutal but unevenly ex-
perienced pandemic: how to balance
rational risk-taking with community
obligations and realism about what’s
still ahead. It is reasonable, for example,
to expect vaccinated people who gather
at home with vaccinated friends and
relatives to continue wearing masks in
public settings.
The winter wave is ending, and there
is every chance, with luck and vigilance,
that we won’t soon see its like again,
even if the coronavirus and its descen-
dants linger. Recently, Fauci told CNN
both that he thought life might return
to its usual patterns by the end of this
year and that Americans might still be
wearing masks in 2022. As he put it, “It
really depends on what you mean by
normality.” One can, in the course of a
long pandemic, begin to get used to too
many intolerable things. But it would
be disastrous to grow numb to hope.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin
