n March 3, my husband received an email. He has a fellowship this
year that comes with a workspace. A new policy had just been insti-
tuted: Travelers to Italy could not return to the offi ce for 14 days.
My husband was four days shy of meeting this mark. I unhelpfully
pointed out that he had been home for a week and a half, he’d been
to the offi ce many times and if he’d been infected with the corona-
virus (I very much doubted he was), he had regularly contaminated
the shared kitchen, the communal table and probably more than
one of his offi cemates. Another friend, who’d also been in northern
Italy, wasn’t told by the New York public school where she teaches
to stay home. Neither my daughter nor any of the over 6,000 children
she goes to high school with were asked where they’d been over
the break. On the other end of the caution spectrum, Columbia
University, where I work, tracked the travel itineraries of people
currently affi liated with the university and issued multi-daily updates
and guidance. Yet the sum result of my family members’ and friends’
memberships with these many groups, each of which responded
with diff ering degrees of vigilance or indiff erence, was a sense of
collective confusion.
While in Italy, I read a book about Venice by Jan Morris, also the
author of a book about the fi rst summiting of Mount Everest, which
I read following our return. It’s no mystery why I’m obsessed with
survival-in-the-wild accounts in books and on TV: These stories
are about a single person against the world, or a single family. In
either case, you’re the victim and the hero, and you’ve usually killed
nothing, or nothing human, at least, by winning. Which is why it’s
hard to acknowledge, maybe no matter who you are, but especially
if you’re a person like me, who calms herself by strategizing how to
avoid unlikely tragic outcomes (a coping strategy primarily, if not
exclusively, available to those whose daily life is defi ned by safety),
that the danger isn’t coming for you. I had established danger as the
thing existing outside the gates of my life. It requires an enormous,
head-warping perspective shift (especially during a pandemic) to
accept the inverse: Yo u are the danger.olumbia University, where I am as I write this, is functionally my home,
the place I guess I’d stay in order to avoid all the world’s danger. This
is not so far from true. I live a protected existence. I’m in subsidized
faculty housing. Our building is beyond the campus, but only just. The
campus is invisibly, or implicitly, surrounded by a wall. At most entry
and exit points, there’s a gate. One, on Morningside Drive, is always
locked, for reasons I guess I’ve long
accepted as logical ones, given the
crime rate in Morningside Park,
though what it might symbolize
has nothing to do with logic.
Two other gates — one set facing
Broadway and Barnard College,
the other facing 114th Street — are
only occasionally locked. The two
main gates, on either end of what is
known as College Walk, are ‘‘access
restricted’’ only during graduation.
Almost every time the campussecurity guards line up to calmly funnel the students wearing blue
gowns inside the gates before they close, I’m reminded of the ’60s
protest footage I’ve watched, when city police offi cers padlocked the
same gates with a giant chain. Inside, the students were protesting
while outside other students were trying to break through the gates,
so they could protest, too. At graduation, likewise, it has never been
clear to me, once the ceremony begins, whether celebrators are being
kept out or in.
The land on which the university is built has a history of institutions
that unoffi cially protect the people outside from the inside, or the
inside from the out. The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum occupied the
campus grounds from 1821 to 1889. The buildings, and the grounds,
isolated the patients from the city’s presumably healthier population,
as did the topography (the neighborhood was and is on top of a high,
rocky plateau, bordered on two sides by cliff s). The stigma of men-
tal illness discouraged any surrounding development until after the
Bloomingdale closed. Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor at the Colum-
bia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and
author of a history of Morningside Heights, explains how the insti-
tution and its patients were seen as ‘‘a blight on the neighborhood.’’
The Bloomingdale gone and its site vacant, other large institutions
— Columbia University, St. John the Divine, St. Luke’s Hospital — start-
ed to build on the plateau during the early 1890s. In 1904, the subway
arrived, and soon after it blocks and blocks of residential apartment
buildings (my 12-story apartment building was built in 1912; the one
across the street in 1910). The neighborhood, by time and need and
opportunity and forgetting, was considered decontaminated. Only a
single building from the asylum remains — it’s in the middle of the
Columbia campus — and not even as a reminder. Few of the people
walking past it have any idea what it is.
If the asylum once kept the people outside safe from the people
inside, during the 1970s, the situation on Columbia’s campus inverted.
The city crime rate high — and around the university, on all sides,
extremely high, such that few professors wanted to live in the same
apartment buildings we now fi ght to inhabit — that same plot of land
became a place where danger, it was thought, existed from without,
rather than within. The sticky remnants of this era created resentment
and distrust from the surrounding community, especially to the east,
where the university and the neighborhood below are separated by
a 100-foot cliff. The resulting tensions have spiked intermittently over
the decades, most recently in December, when, devastatingly, a Bar-
nard student was killed beyond the gates and below the cliff , result-
ing in three very young teenagers’ being charged in connection with
her death. This multipronged tragedy provoked many conversations
outside and inside about outside and inside and how these lingering
distinctions perpetuated harm.
But when on March 8, because of Covid-19, Columbia canceled all
in-person classes, the gates — as property lines or symbols — became
superfl uous. That fi rst morning, nobody appeared to be inside or
outside them. No students vectoring between classes. No tourists
taking photos of the libraries. As Covid-19 extended its infl uence
beyond whatever borders or containment measures, the questions
of where (and on which side of which boundary) a person was safer
became harder and harder to answer, as were whether a person was
the victim of danger or danger’s unwitting perpetrator, and what is
safety, and what counts as ‘‘security,’’ and who is going through it, and
from where to where.It would seem that I’m building to the following admission: And
then we all tested positive for the virus. We didn’t, but neither could
we get tested. Though no one in my familyP. 53 The New York Times Magazine
O
C
I’m still trying to
understand how I failed
to activate thearguably most excellent
part of my mind — its
department of disaster
preparedness.
““
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