Sorry Haters, New York Won’t Die

What’s also almost certainly true is that the city will be poorer when this is over. As anyone who listens to Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily updates knows, the state’s finances are in bad shape, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell seems disinclined to help. It’s possible that the deadbeat federal government will not support the Wuhan of America and that New York will have to endure rounds and rounds of devastating budget cuts, of the kind we haven’t seen in decades.

But even if the rich abandon us, and even if the people who were eventually going to move to the suburbs choose that life a little sooner, and even if the treasury runs empty, that doesn’t mean New York will die. At worst, it means that the New York of the present will die. And the New York of the present is always dying.

The city has survived many different versions of itself. My kids have grown up in the shadow of Gossip Girl. New York, to them, is a city full of ditzy wealthy people. I grew up in the graffiti-decorated, crime-filled New York of the ’80s. My parents grew up in the bohemian New York of the ’60s. New York can adapt. New York does adapt. Sometimes the city’s full of garbage, sometimes limos and super-tall skyscrapers, and once upon a time horse-drawn carriages and fur merchants. If the coronavirus brings back some of the grit we’ve lost, I won’t mind. I’m sure I’m not the only New Yorker who thinks it’s about time for a reset anyway.

Before we turn to the future, though, we need to mourn our dead—something those prediction pieces tend to just skip over. Whether or not New York is dying, its people are. We’ve lost some 20,000 souls in the city, and we’re still losing about 100 more every day. We have to wrap our minds around the sheer magnitude of our collective loss: the dead grandfathers and grandmothers, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors. The first thing we have to do when the pandemic ends is hold long-postponed memorial services and honor the first responders, the hospital support staff, the nurses, the transit workers.

Then we can go about proving the haters wrong, again. New York won’t be what it was, but New York is never what it was. Maybe the new New York will be a better place.