New York, New York (Archive From April 2020)

This article was originally published in April 2020.

I’ve been thinking a lot about travel these days, not in the least because just before New York City closed down non-essential businesses in March, my husband and I traveled there to celebrate his birthday.  We stayed at a hotel we love, dined at restaurants that are old favorites, and enjoyed a great evening of jazz in the city.  It was a wonderful trip, albeit one that when we look back on it we now see clearly was a different world in a different time.

We are guessing that at least a few of those places we enjoyed won’t be reopening, and that it will be a long time before NYC develops a “new normal” in the post-coronavirus world.  One estimate suggests that as many as 70% of the city’s restaurants won’t survive this crisis, a heartbreaking statistic whether that is a tiny mom-and-pop or a 3-Michelin-star restaurant.

I travel to New York a good amount on business, but these days my meetings are all on Zoom, a poor substitute for the joy of exiting Penn Station to quickly catch a cab to my hotel; landing at LaGuardia while seeing the city below come into focus in the early morning; and walking in Central Park on a Saturday afternoon.  Chris and I generally spend at least one long weekend a year in the city as well, with no business plans, and we miss that too.

Ezra Pound said of New York:

And New York is the most beautiful city in the world?  It is not far from it.  No urban night is like the night there . . . Squares after squares of flame, set up and cut into the aether.  Here is our poetry, for we have pulled down the stars to our will.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald also loved New York, and made it his playground as well as a touchstone of his novels.  He spoke of it as having “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world” and his writing was imbued with all the promise that belongs to that phrase.

Today, New York is heavily shuttered, and waiting for a sort of re-birth – and when that happens we will be ready, tickets in hand and suitcases at the ready.