Llewellyn King: Can NYC recover its swagger after COVID-19?

In the energy of midtown Manhattan

NEW YORK

Alistair Cooke, the great British journalist who wrote his weekly “Letter from America” – a paean to the United States -- for 58 years, reserved some of his most lavish praise for Manhattan. When Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, visited America and wanted to see Disney World, Cooke told him he’d never see anything as extraordinary as the Manhattan skyline.

I was reminded of this long-ago admonishment recently, when I had the opportunity to see Manhattan from the water, cruising around the island on a friend’s yacht, looking at that skyline, those fingers of buildings, thrusting toward heaven in a forest of architectural and engineering creativity that has no equal on earth. Dubai may aspire but it doesn’t compete.

Manhattan is awe on steroids.

I’ve savored and, at times, detested it for decades. I suffered its awfulness at the bottom when many newspapers closed and I, an immigrant with no resources, found work as a busboy at the Horn & Hardart on 42nd Street – one of the food-service automats which were once a feature of New York City. They were where the hapless could sit unbothered for long hours without buying anything beyond coffee; where they could stay warm and sheltered in the winter.

I’ve also savored Manhattan in good times, staying at the Carlyle Hotel, one of the best hotels in the world, up there with the Ritz in Paris and Brown’s in London.

It was said when I lived there in the 1960s, that New York was a city for the extraordinarily rich and the extremely poor. I found work in Washington and stayed south; New York became a place to visit.

If it was a hard place to be poor in 1965, the extremes of poverty and wealth only increased with time.

More great buildings, enabled by engineering that allowed them to be planted in smaller plots of land, sprouted in Manhattan. Spindle apartment buildings and sprawling waterfront office developments were built with money that flowed in from hedge funds, tech companies, Russian oligarchs, Chinese billionaires, and Middle Eastern oil-garchs.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the Big Apple felt its vulnerability to a hostile, premeditated attack. Now it is facing its greatest crisis, one that will wound it mortally if not fatally: COVID-19.

New York City has an uncertain future. People are moving out, selling their expensive co-ops at a loss, and buying in less-crowded places on Long Island, in the Hudson Valley, Connecticut, and even farther afield.

As I looked in wonder at the city of striving people, epitomized by its buildings that themselves seem to strive to go ever higher, I wondered whether New York is over, destined to a slow death; its apartments in the clouds likely to be abandoned, and its trove of office space to sit empty as a new generation grows into the idea that working from home — home far away — is the norm, the new way to think about work.

The New York Times has looked at the problem and its writers can’t, it seems, bring themselves to answer the question: Is it over?

The city’s impending tragedy will be played out in other cities, but it is in New York that it will be most visible, most painful; the dream most shattered.

Sure, you might say, it was built on greed and now it must pay the price. But it was also built on much else: immigration, diversity, financial acumen, theater, fine art, sweat and toil -- and that most human of emotions: aspiration.

I hope that the new normal will allow cities to recover and New York to swagger forward as it has in the past: difficult to live in and difficult to live without. It’s a miracle of a city, a big shiny apple.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Website: whchronicle.com

In Korea Town, one of New York’s many ethnic neighborhoods

Three springs

1910 postcard

 From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

As the leaves push out, I think of three memorable springs, for me, anyway. The first is the spring of 1966, when we seniors were rapidly heading for graduation at our  boarding school at the edge of the lovely Litchfield Hills, in Connecticut. While we faced the pressure of final papers and exams, and saw the Vietnam War looming, all in all, it was a delightful time.  One reason is that a nice youngish married couple – the Woods -- with a couple of  kids lived in a house down the road. They were friends of one of my classmate’s parents.

A bunch of us, ranging from four people to seven, would often bicycle to their rambling white 19th Century house, in nearby Middlebury, and hang out. On a couple of occasions, they had us to dinner, where illegally (?) they served us wine, and everyone would smoke in their backyard, whose spring lushness and freshness I still recall. Thus, we enjoyed the pleasures of adulthood without its responsibilities. It got better and better as the leaves thickened and we luxuriated in the first  hot days. It may have just been the fact that it was a time of transition for us, and so everything seemed intensified, but I can’t remember a more beautiful spring.

Finally, a few days before graduation, which I was slightly dreading because as the head of the student government I had to speak before the commencement multitudes, the Woods gave us a farewell dinner, which I found moving. That was the last time that our group all met together.  And, not surprisingly, several of us have been dead for years.

Then there was the spring of 1970, during my senior year at college, when everything was disrupted by partial college closings associated with protests against the war in Vietnam and Cambodia. The proximate cause was the fatal shooting of four anti-war student demonstrators at Kent State University, on May 4. Many colleges, including mine, Dartmouth College, decided (wrongly, in my view) to let everyone take all courses pass/fail and took other measures that turned the final weeks of that academic year into an excuse to have a hypocritically good time. As President Nixon reduced our military in Vietnam, and then the draft was ended, the protests faded, whatever was happening to the Vietnamese.

In any event, the Upper Connecticut Valley was much warmer than average that year and gorgeous. That late spring almost felt like summer camp. Frisbees flying everywhere.  I left with only vague ideas of what I’d be doing next.

And now, half a century later, the Class of 2020 has had its in-person commencement postponed  to June 2021, as the black swan of COVID-19 flies over.  I wonder how many graduates will make it to that one.

The third spring I vividly remember came in 1972, as I was preparing to get my master’s degree at Columbia University, which was then still recuperating from the student unrest of the previous few years. Although graffiti-splattered-New York City was then in decline because of old industries leaving and/or shrinking, corporate headquarters fleeing to Connecticut, crime, labor strikes and municipal mismanagement, “The City’’ to many young people was still the most exciting and alluring place to be in America, and not all that expensive compared to most of the stretch from the ‘80s to the last couple of months, when COVID-19 has driven down housing and other prices.

I remember how easy it seemed to get a job, which I did before commencement, and the bright prospect of adventures to come. I felt, briefly, fancy free, as I strolled through Riverside Park up to Columbia, at 115th Street, from the  big apartment at West 88th Street I shared with, numbers depending on the month, three to five people directly or indirectly connected with the movie and TV business. The rather ugly, city-tough, plane trees were unfurling and I smelled the inexplicable scent of wet bread. The city seemed full of promise, and it will again.

John H. Fitzhugh: A plan for America to reopen for business

Ironically, New York might be one of the first places to reopen for business in the COVID-19 pandemic.

President Trump has been widely criticized for expressing a desire that Americans return to work by Easter. He later modified his remarks to say that reopening of businesses would depend on such local factors as population density and infection rates for the COVID-19 virus.

I am a “Never Trumper” but in this case applaud the president for raising two critical issues: one, how we decide when to return to work, and two, the importance of work.

The current strategy of fighting this virus, based on current medical advice, is to distance ourselves from each other, thus “flattening the curve” of infection to better use our limited medical resources, such as hospital beds and ventilators. This approach, we are told, will lengthen the period during which people are at risk for infection but save innumerable lives.

Some areas of the country have been better at this than others or, because of population density, are simply already “socially distanced.” New York City, unfortunately, is not, it being one of the most densely populated cities in America. Its attack rate (ratio of those infected to those tested) is very high, which means that the infection period will be shorter but potentially more deadly than elsewhere in the U.S.

Ironically, this also means that New York City may be one of the first places that could reopen for business because most residents will have been infected and either recovered or unfortunately passed away.

But now let’s turn to the importance of resuming business, and how we decide to do so.

American business is, with some notable exceptions, closed for business. It is dead in the water, to use a nautical expression. Critical industries are still functioning, either with limited staffs or on-line, but most are idle. This is especially true of small businesses, retail shops and many service industries. My guess is that the gross domestic product (GDP) overall is not 20 percent of what it should be, or was before the virus shutdown.

Congress has passed legislation directing some $2 trillion to offset this shutdown. The Federal Reserve has made an additional $4 trillion available. This is the largest financial bailout ever and,  it is said, will help for maybe “a few months.” In my opinion, already one crucial month has passed.  Now, I’m not an economist, but I don’t think that even the federal government has the wherewithal to do such a recovery effort a second time. If it tried to do so, I believe, it would lead to hyper-inflation, a drastically lower stock market, and even violent social protest. Thus we have one opportunity to get this right before a much greater catastrophe engulfs us.

The bottom line is that to sustain America the way we know it, or knew it before March 1, Americans must get back to work, the quicker the better. 

So then, how do we decide when that is, or even, who decides? Is it the president, Congress, state legislators, governors? Health officials, business owners? The people themselves? And what are the criteria?

One thing to me is clear. We can’t wait until everyone has been infected or until the last person with the infection has died. That would be months into the future. We must accept the risk, in fact the likelihood, that some persons will sicken and die after we resume working. That is certainly unfortunate, but the economic consequences of not resuming work are even more dire to our society.

Here are my suggestions, but they should be examined by statisticians and epidemiologists because these decisions are largely data driven:

First, employers must decide individually the risk to their enterprise, employees and customers from reopening. What are the COVID-19 trends in the community in which they operate? How well have they been able to function on line? How has the virus affected their market? (For example, if your business model depends on a large crowd of people gathering, it may take months for people to feel comfortable doing it.)

Second, how well have the local hospitals been handling those who need treatment? If they are overwhelmed, and people are dying from lack of care rather than from the virus itself, it’s hard to support a general reopening of business that runs the risk of increasing the number of patients.

Clearly one size does not fit all. It may be prudent to reopen business in Nebraska or Texas, for example, but not in New York or Los Angeles. Then again, if the infection rate is soaring in New Hampshire but the worst is over in New York, it might make sense to resume operations in New York but not New Hampshire.

When it comes to government oversight,  our 50 governors have a better handle on local COVID-19 conditions than our national government. Working with the local businesses, I think that governors using their emergency public-health powers can individually decide when and who should reopen. This power could extend, as it does now, to in-state operations of large multi-state or international enterprises. Governors can give a go-ahead but it will be up to each business how to respond.

The federal government can provide resources and coordination. The president can use his bully pulpit to set the general direction ( as he has done by broaching the subject of return to work). What would  help a lot is a computer model that considers for each enterprise the risks to itself and its customers and community of reopening its business. Certainly mathematicians and economists now have time and reason to build such models. Governors or private groups could then set markers for when resumption of business is prudent.

John H. (“Josh”) Fitzhugh is chairman of Montpelier, Vt.-based Union Mutual Insurance Co. as well as journalist and farmer. He was founding editor of the National Law Journal and was legal counsel to former Vermont Governors Howard Dean and Richard Snelling.

Prelude to pollution

'Prelude,'' by PAT COOMEY THORNTON, AT Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass.

In New York City. You can feel/smell the edge of summer crud pushing at  the freshness of spring. More homeless on the street. They're usually old; everyone else seems about 25. Is the new mayor tough enough to keep this city under control?