New York City Is Not Dead

I’ve never lived in New York City. I can’t even honestly say that I was ever tempted to. One of my favorite feelings is that relaxing feeling you get when you leave NYC. That peace, quiet, bliss. You look back at the urban jungle from the cab or train or plane, and you feel all that tense energy and anxiety that the city breeds melt away, your face literally relaxes.

But I’d be lying if I said I don’t enjoy visiting the city. It can be a frustrating place, but it’s such a fun place, an energizing place, a yummy place, an endlessly entertaining place.

The last time I left New York was in March of 2020. As fate would have it, we had planned a sequence of public events for work and we scheduled the first in San Francisco and the second in New York City.

The one in New York was scheduled for the first week of March 2020.

We didn’t know March 2020 was special.

We found out along with the rest of the world.

I spent that week in the city with a couple of colleagues, we had our event on a Wednesday, and by Friday the news about a mysterious new virus in the city became pretty alarming. I remember planning to meet some friends Friday night at a bar, and, having freaked out and canceled on them, getting a room at the TWA Hotel at JFK (which is so impossibly cool) and spending the night reading the news before flying back to California — not to fly again for over a year, not even to stay at a hotel again for over a year.

What a year that was. There’s been so much written about the new age of remote work, people moving out of cities, cities dying, people leaving forever, never to return. And that is surely true for some. I’m in my thirties, so many of my friends are at that life stage where they would naturally move out of the city, toddler in tow, looking for a backyard with a fence and a good school. It’s hard to afford either in NYC. But COVID was an excuse — they were never long for the city anyway. They just said the city was dead as a cover story for when they left.

But I suspected this city was not dead.

I landed back at JFK eighteen months after that March 2020 escape, and I was curious to see what I would find, what the city was like in August 2021. To be honest, I was hoping New York was back.

The Lyft from JFK takes me past Brasserie Les Halles (permanently closed says Google Maps), the restaurant where Anthony Bourdain began his career as a chef. I think of Kitchen Confidential and Parts Unknown and Roadrunner — of Anthony Bourdain’s life, and Anthony Bourdain’s death.

I remember reading a piece by Bourdain about personal finance. One bit that stuck with me was a story of his younger years when, often broke and not knowing of FICO scores and credit cards, he’d take out a new credit card, quit a job, and go on vacation, a vacation that would last exactly as long as the credit on the new card lasted.

When the card was done, the trip was done.

I remember thinking, back when I first read that, what a weird metaphor for New York City that was, a city that lives on credit, lives on making credit and trading credit and, maybe most of all, taking credit.

But, I think I had it wrong. New York City is its own thing, and I think 2020 proved it.

Jerry Seinfeld wrote,

You found a place in Florida? Fine. We know the sharp focus and restless, resilient creative spirit that Florida is all about. You think Rome is going away too? London? Tokyo? The East Village?

They’re not. They change. They mutate. They re-form. Because greatness is rare. And the true greatness that is New York City is beyond rare.

I drove in from JFK and I was excited for what I would find. Is NYC dead? Is it back alive? How has it changed? How has it mutated? How has it re-formed?

I decided to take mental note of moments along the way, keep a two week journal of sorts. Maybe it will be of interest to others. Certainly, I thought, it’s a memento I wanted to keep for myself, of this time, of coming back to NYC after 18 weird months and being curious about what I’d find.

So here we go.

It’s Sunday, and it’s raining outside. The kind of rain that starts weak but somehow already heavy with intent, the sky is dark and menacing, the kind of sky that inspires no confidence that the weather will get better.

We try to go to a wine bar with some friends. Unfortunately, one of them did not bring her ID, and they don’t let people in without a vaccination card and an ID. So we can’t get in. But inside, there are people. It’s Sunday and people are at a wine bar, vaccinated, having fun. NYC is not dead.

I meet up with a buddy for dinner. He suggested a Ukrainian restaurant in the East Village. It’s a large, dark restaurant, the tables are spaced far apart, and there’s only three occupied tables. But as we sit and wait for our food, we can hear the conversation at one of them: two bald guys in their 60s are arguing about Crimea. That’s New York for you. NYC is not dead.

Hurricane Henri passes and the weather turns hot, very hot, the kind of hot and humid and sticky that makes the urban jungle feel stifling. I’m sitting outside at an Italian restaurant with a friend I made over the pandemic, over Zoom. It’s the first time we’ve actually met in person. We’re talking about Afghanistan and the way the US left that twenty year war. There’s amazing Italian food, delicious fish, cold beers. It’s hot and a bit uncomfortable, but the outdoor dining scene is no joke — the best restaurants have all erected streetside dining rooms, practically, and the streets feel lively.

We walk through Washington Square Park afterwards, and it’s packed — really packed — with students. College is about to start and there’s that nervous energy throughout of students who just showed up for college, first time living away from home, in New York City. This city is not dead.

A friend invites me to Montauk on the weekend. I’ve never been. I know it’s where New Yorkers escape to in the summer and I know it’s kinda fancy. That’s basically all I know as I board the bus — the “Jitney” as the locals call it — and head out of town for the weekend.

Montauk is more rural feeling than I thought. I thought it’d be more suburban, but it does actually have a remote, slightly fishing village feel to it. That is, if you ignore the prices. Who charges $35 for a takeaway lobster sandwich? Montauk does. Because they can.

I find myself at Surf Lodge, definitely the hot spot to be at on a Saturday night at Montauk. People are dressed up, there’s a line outside, the food is meh but no one cares, because they are here to see and be seen. The sun goes down, and the dance floor revs up. Then, at eleven, there’s a fire alarm. No one knows if it’s real or if some idiot pulled the fire alarm, but they evacuate the dance floor and say the night is over. People are standing outside, thinking about getting an Uber, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their night. Then the security folks come out and say, never mind, false alarm, all clear.

You can feel the stampede, sense the energy with which all these dressed up city people storm their way back to the dance floor. They don’t walk, they run. There’s a sense of desperate energy, like everyone is allowed to party again, finally, and has to get the most of it while they still can, while the pandemics and fires and hurricanes allow. This place is not dead.

We go for a walk along the beach in Montauk. There’s a seagull eating a baby shark. Apt metaphor for…something. Nature has its moments here too.

Back in the city. It was hot, but now it’s raining again. Now it’s Hurricane Ida. Henri proved to be not so bad, but Ida is a different story.

We go out for a big team dinner in Greenwich Village. It’s raining like crazy outside, a solid wall of water coming down just where the awning ends. No one is particularly eager to go home, but eventually we have to. Some people have a short walk home, normally something to look forward to after dinner but now just a run that gets you drenched. Others have to drive to New Jersey, navigate ponds and ford rivers that normally don’t exist. But now they do. But for now, we can sit at dinner and watch the rain come down, and the yellow cabs drive by, spraying sidewalks. The city is not dead.

I have a clear morning in my schedule, so I go for a walk down to the Lower East Side to grab a bagel at Russ & Daughters. It’s a timeless little place. I decide to live a little and get the fanciest bagel on the menu — the Boychik, with sable and lox and scallion cream cheese. They bring it out, I bite into it, and realize there’s no fish. It’s just a toasted bagel with scallion cream cheese. Oy, where’s the fish?

I go up to the counter and ask them about the sable and lox. It gets loud. There’s apologizing, there’s joking, there’s yelling, there’s giving someone in the back shit for forgetting the fish on the Boychik. Oy vey. That scene itself is timeless, and it makes me smile. This city is not dead.

I was going to fly back on Saturday but there’s so much going on, I get talked into extending my stay through Sunday. There’s a festival, Electric Zoo, happening on Randall Island. I won’t stay through the long weekend, but I join some friends for just the one day. I’m not even that into EDM, but I am into an outdoor music concert in New York City for the first time after a long time when such gatherings hadn’t happened. Some big names show up — Tiesto, Steve Aoki, Kaskade — and each one, somewhere along the way in their set, finds a pause and takes the moment to say, “It’s so good to be back, New York! Hell yes! I love you New York City! New York is Back!”

The crowd is huge, and it goes wild every time that happens.

People are hungry for this.

New York is back. This city is anything but dead.

I think back to the very first time I came to New York. It was in 2000, for the “Millennium” New Year’s Eve. We lived on the West Coast and had never been to New York, and with all the hoopla around Y2K, which both my Microsoftie parents found hilarious, they decided we should finally make a family vacation trip to New York and be there for Y2K itself. We went to Times Square and saw the ball drop.

The thing I most remember though, in retrospect, is going to the World Trade Center. We went up to the observation deck first thing in the morning one day, and saw the city from up above. Nine months later, 9/11 happened. And people were saying New York is dead after that.

But New York’s spirit animal is the subway rat. It never dies. And twenty years after 9/11, it didn’t die from that, and a decade later, it didn’t die from the financial crisis, and 18 months after March 2020, it hasn’t died from a pandemic either. There’s a pattern.

New York is alive.

It still feels great to take off from JFK. I still feel myself relaxing and I’m glad to be heading home, but I’m also glad New York is largely still what New York always was. A city that buzzes with energy in a way no other city does. A city that feels so very much alive.

Bourdain would have loved it here in 2021.

PS. We’re opening a new Modern Treasury office in New York City.

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