The Times Magazine 17city dropped by 73 per cent in 2020 compared
with the previous year, losing the city another
$1.2 billion in tax revenue. NYC & Co, the
city’s tourism agency, estimates that total
visitor spending in 2021 was $24 billion,
down from about $47 billion in 2019.
From May 2020 to June 2021, nearly
200 hotels closed down, according to the
Hotel Association of New York City, and as of
mid-November, almost 100 remained closed.
Laura Pugliese, a make-up artist for
television shows including Good Morning
America, was living in downtown Manhattan
with her family when the pandemic took hold.
Unlike Kim Kaupe and her fiancé, however,
“We had nowhere to go. We didn’t have a
holiday home or any family close by that we
could go to stay with.” She and her husband
and their two children, aged six and eight,
“were trapped in our apartment, just trying
to get through every day”.
Pugliese had arrived in the city aged 26,
“with no fear, no money, knowing not a single
soul, but with an internship at Madonna’s
record label”. A self-described “diehard” New
Yorker ever since, “I would have nightmares
about leaving the city.”
In late May 2020, after the death of George
Floyd, New York erupted in protest, most of it
peaceful, some of it not. Thousands of riot
police occupied areas of Manhattan and
Brooklyn. A week-long curfew was imposed,
the first in the city since 1943.
“I couldn’t take my kids outside. It felt so
tense,” says Pugliese. “The police were so
reactive, and helicopters sat low over our
apartment day and night. It felt like a military
presence.” It was, she says, the first time she’d
felt scared in the city.
She remembers precisely the minute she
knew she had to get out. “I was driving down
Broadway, where everything was boarded up
and graffitied and there was nobody around
at all.” When she reached lower Manhattan,
“People had taken advantage of the peaceful
protest and there was now a homeless
encampment outside City Hall. There were
junkies shooting up in the middle of the park.”
Homelessness has rocketed in New York
during the pandemic, reaching a record high
of around 80,000 people. Tented homeless
encampments have mushroomed around the
city, including north of Lincoln Centre on the
Upper West Side, around Washington Square
Park downtown, and underneath the tourist
favourite, the High Line. In an effort to lure
back tourists and office workers, the city’s
sanitation department has, for months, been
clearing dozens of encampments a day.
Along with a vow to bring back businesses,
the incoming mayor, Eric Adams, was elected
on a platform of fighting crime, which has also
risen dramatically in the pandemic. Murders
in the city went up 47 per cent in 2020,robberies and assaults are both up, and violent
crime reported on the subway is now double
what it was in 2019. Before leaving New York,
having previous travelled on the subway even
in the small hours, I stopped using it after dark.
“I always used to walk around the city at
night on my own and always felt incredibly
safe,” says Kaupe. “Now, there aren’t as many
people on the streets and there’s a general
undertone that feels unsafe. I have friends
who have had their handbags stolen in broad
daylight, and male friends who have felt
nervous walking back alone to their hotels
at night. It feels like a city in a third world
country compared with February 2020.”
Rats, which have always been a feature
of New York life, have become a major
health concern. There were 21,000 rat
sightings reported to the city’s non-emergency
telephone line, 311, last year, compared with
15,000 in the same period in 2019.
Friends report the city feeling dirtier, more
dangerous, the infrastructure crumbling more
visibly every month; and without the energy
and buzz for which it is famed, many wonder
what is the point of struggling to stay.
Then there’s the thorny issue of education,
which Pugliese succinctly calls “a racket”.
There are plenty of private schools, costing
an average of $19,220 per year (£14,500), but
the city’s enormous public school network- encompassing 1.1 million children – is a
lottery system, with places awarded via a
complex application process and not based on
geography. I have friends whose 11-year-old
twins attend different schools, miles apart, and
others with 13-year-olds who take three buses
to reach their school two boroughs away.
“You have to tour all the schools and
rank them,” says Megan Eliot, 43, a clinical
psychologist. “It’s like a college application
process every four years.”
Eliot and her husband, Alex, who works
in real estate, had lived in Manhattan, then
bought an apartment in Brooklyn before their
first daughter, now six, was born; their second
daughter is now three.
Alex, a born-and-bred New Yorker, had
balked at even crossing the East River from
Manhattan to Brooklyn, but after a six-week
escape to rural Connecticut in the summer
of 2020, he began suggesting they make a
more permanent move. “It was nice to have a
backyard for six weeks, and we noticed how
much better everyone got along when they
had their own space,” says Eliot.
In October 2021, they moved to Weston
in semi-rural Connecticut, to a six-bedroom
house. “Family life is a lot easier,” says Eliot.
And applying for schools is simple. “There’s
one school system, with four buildings on the
same campus.”
Emma Patterson has found the same in
Westchester. “Trying to navigate the New
York public-school system felt like a full-time
job; it was overwhelming. Now, all the kids in
the surrounding streets go to the same school.”
With smaller districts and less bureaucracy,
schools outside New York were also quicker to
reopen in the pandemic. “There was a huge
sense of relief, just from the kids being able to
be in school,” says Pugliese.
There are plenty of downsides, says Eliot.
“I miss public space. In Brooklyn, after school,
everyone is hanging out in the playground
with their kids. Here, everyone is in their
houses or their big backyards – the hours
between four and six here are much more
isolating than they were in the city – and you
have to actually schedule playdates.” After-
school clubs are different too. “The talent pool
in New York means that the person running
your kid’s theatre class would be an out-of-
work Broadway actor who had graduated from
[prestigious drama school] Tisch.” She also
misses high-quality food delivery. “Once a
week we say, ‘Let’s order in for dinner,’ and
there just aren’t any options.” Nonetheless,
she says she knows it was the right move.
Pugliese has more complicated feelings
about her relocation. “A friend told me that
I have to stop seeing leaving the city as a
failure, that I came, I conquered and I was
there for 21 years – that’s solid.” She realised,
she says, that, “Some of my resistance was my
ego but, really, what was I trying to prove?”
“You have to have a little bit of grit to
live in New York,” agrees Patterson. “Grit
or money or both. We don’t have the money.
And I think between the pandemic and
parenthood, I just lost the grit to live there.” nEmma Patterson with her husband and their daughter,
Lucy, in Brooklyn. They were priced out of the city and
now live in a commuter town 30 miles awayRATS HAVE BECOME A
MAJOR HEALTH PROBLEM.
SIGHTINGS ARE UP 40 PER
CENT IN TWO YEARS
COURTESY OF EMMA PATTERSON