Why we still ♥ NY
“New York City Misses You Too.” Presumptuous but effective, as advertising slogans go, in that it prompted in me a nagging question: did I miss New York? If so, how much? Enough to do something about it?
The above legend was emblazoned across an illuminated billboard, skyscraper-tall, backed by a photo of Manhattan by night, lights atwinkle. I passed it on each occasion I took the Westway into central London and back home again — several times each week, during the months and, now, years following the peak of the pandemic. I had plenty of time to stare at it, to register the fact that circumstances in the travel industry remained so grave that even the second greatest city in the world was reduced to pleading, presumptuously or not, for British tourists to visit.
From the mid-1990s until five years ago, like so many people, I made regular pilgrimages to Manhattan; at least once or twice a year. Initially, entirely for pleasure. Then, for business and pleasure. Latterly, mostly for business. But in the period preceding the pandemic the trips became less frequent, and since 2018 I hadn’t been at all.
Feedback from those who had was not uniformly positive. Friends and colleagues, and some permanent residents, too, reported that the city seemed to have suffered more than most from the lockdowns and their aftermaths. The way they told it, the Bagel had gone stale. New York, I was told, was tatty, bedraggled, even humbled. Hard to believe — and I didn’t, quite. But still my informants persisted: the Subway was overrun by crazies; rats the size of sheepdogs had taken control of Central Park; the whole place stank of weed. Not in a good way.
Frankly, this all seemed a bit rich to me: these were the same people who had complained for decades that New York had been gentrified into submission, Downtown had been Disneyfied, Brooklyn’s edge had been blunted. Now urban archivists who had long mythologised a lost demi-monde of junkie punk poets were holding their noses and coming over all suburban about... littering. What happened to the concrete jungle where dreams are made of?
Local press confirmed that New York is suffering. Crime is up. Rates of fatal overdoses are skyrocketing. An influx of tens of thousands of asylum seekers is putting an almighty strain on the public purse — and, it seemed to me from talking to friends there, the public patience. (Aren’t poor, huddled masses what New York was built on?) There is a housing drought and a glut of empty offices. Midtown is uncannily quiet compared to pre-pandemic levels, as people continue to work from home and businesses shutter or downsize or relocate. Tax revenue from commercial real estate has plummeted. The tech sector is in retreat. Adding idiocy to injury, to widespread consternation the mayor, Eric Adams, recently authorised a redesign of Milton Gla
