An Empty Manhattan
Driving to New York City at the start of Covid was an adventure I'll never forget
Almost four years ago, on the first day of spring, I drove to New York City. It’s a trip I’ve made countless times over the past 15 years by car, train, and bus, so it should have been old hat by then.
But it wasn’t. Like the rest of the country, on March 21, 2020, New York City was shutting down due to Covid-19.
The trip to Manhattan was to pick up our son, Ben, and his partner, Gaby. Trains were impossible to get, and they had waited until the last possible second to evacuate. So on that Saturday morning, a bright crisp day that normally would have seen crowds jamming Central Park and Times Square, I drove toward a city where everyone was staying inside.
Restaurants, bars, and nonessential businesses were closed. Outdoor activities were limited to getting groceries, medicine and exercising. A stay-at-home order was taking full effect that evening. In Alexandria, even though our downsized home was crowded, everyone would be in safer and more welcoming confines.
En route to their apartment, I drove through Midtown shooting photos of what felt like a post-apocalyptic scene.
Earlier Times
I will always have a special place in my heart for New York City, a place I did not visit until I was in my mid 30s.
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in a small-ish town on the Texas Gulf Coast, New York was a fantasy land, albeit one filled with grime, crime, and danger, according to my parents. Products of small to small-ish towns, they were risk averse to a fault, and my dad’s illness when I was a child prevented us from going anywhere on an airplane from a financial standpoint.
One aspect of my teenage/early college rebellion — with a few exceptions, I was never much of a rebel — was to read and learn everything I could about New York and the sights/sounds/scene of the Lower East Side. I became and remain fascinated by the world of Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and the music that blasted from CBGB’s every night.
Then, as a journalist working for a string of community dailies, I struggled to pay rent, much less travel. In the era of AIDS and crack, big cities were not destinations then, or so I thought in my pre-FOMO days. Even though I lived for several years in Houston — itself the fourth largest city in the country — New York still seemed far away.
In 1999, while living in tiny Reidsville, N.C., Jill and I ventured to New York to see “Annie Get Your Gun,” the Bernadette Peters/Tom Wopat revival playing at the Marriott Marquis. We were in the throes of early parenthood, having just had three kids in one year, and Jill had played the title role in a community theater production with Ben and Emma (then unknowingly) in utero.
We did some of the tourist things while staying in a hotel — not the Marquis, which was beyond our budget — with a room that barely accommodated the double bed. While the trip was enjoyable, I found myself overwhelmed in Midtown, not fully grasping that the rest of New York was not the theme park that the Disneyfied Times Square had become by the late 1990s.
When we moved to Northern Virginia, my job started taking me to New York on at least an annual basis. We took the kids on the train several times when they were younger and gradually became more comfortable, although we rarely ventured outside Midtown.
In the fall of 2009, our relationship with the city changed for good.
Plays and Photos
That year, when our kids were 16, 12, 11, and 11, Ben was picked to understudy Little Boy in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime.” For a year, Jill and I traded off every three to four days, with one of us staying with Ben in the city while the other took care of Emma and Kate in Northern Virginia.
It was during that chaotic year that I finally got to see and experience New York, warts and all. And it also started my journey into photography, another reason I always will love the city.
Today, few things make me happier than walking around a city with my camera, capturing the random nature, architecture, people, and things that make up our day-to-day lives. Generally avoiding the tourist traps, I learn something new each time I venture out to photograph what I see.
On March 21, 2020, however, there was very little walking. I got out of the car only four times during the 500-mile roundtrip — twice for gas, once for food, and once to load Ben and Gaby’s things before driving back to Virginia.
Over the next several weeks, while we were stuck in quarantine, I started walking through Alexandria. Instead of my Canon, I carried my iPhone.
While it’s a great tool, the phone is similar in quality to the camera I started out with in 2009. It has, for lack of a better term, limits. I took those limits and turned them upside down, accepting what I couldn’t do with the phone as much as what I could. Over the next year, it would prove to be an appealing artistic challenge during an uncertain and unstable time.
Recently, I went back through those images — more than 2,000 in all, captured during almost 3,000 miles of walking — as well as a written diary I kept during the first year of the pandemic. My hope/plan is to publish a book featuring both, starting with the story I’ve told you here.
Wish me luck.
Otherworldly, like being in a shore town in November. Strange days.
I live in upper Manhattan, but did not venture anywhere during the most deserted times...