![]() I walked out into the gray twilight, on a block I don’t think I had ever walked on before, and marveled-in the way you still can in New York after more than 20 years, if you remember to look up-that the buildings were so tall and full of people, everybody navigating the in-between time of early evening. ![]() The subway was not crowded, and it was still cold enough to wear gloves, which I kept on to press the elevator button and to fill out the medical forms. I thought about canceling the appointment-that same day we had begun working from home-but I hadn’t had one in more than five years, and it occurred to me that, in the midst of a global pandemic, if something extra bad happened because I had skipped my routine mammogram I would feel like a world-class idiot. On my last day out this March, before my family retreated indoors and before the city itself began to lower its gates, I got on the Q train in Brooklyn, rode to the East Side, and walked to a doctor’s office on East 61st Street to have a routine mammogram. The memories were unavoidable, baked block by block into the pavement. At what point did it become too much? I kept catching movie-montage glimpses of my younger self, hailing cabs late at night or getting caught in a thunderstorm or treating myself to stockings at Barneys. We met in the city, dated in the city, got engaged in the city, got married in the city, had a child in the city. Max and I had lived on the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, in Greenwich Village and the East Village, and in two neighborhoods in Brooklyn we had seen our local restaurant in the first of those Brooklyn neighborhoods become a favorite of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. I hypothesized that I had walked on every block south of Midtown. I missed Savoy, on the corner of Prince and Crosby. I still missed Grange Hall, which closed in 2004. ![]() When you have spent two decades in the city, you remember not only the restaurant that used to be in the spot where a new restaurant just opened, but the one that was there two restaurants ago the nostalgia can pull you under. ![]() I sometimes felt, I confessed to him, as if I was living in an archaeological dig of my own past. It was that we had lived here as adults for 20 years, and the sedimentary buildup of experience had begun to weigh on us. It wasn’t that we wanted to go somewhere else. "We have to continue to be smart," said Cuomo.A few years ago, on the way home from summer vacation in Rhode Island, my husband and I began discussing the possibility of leaving New York. The governor and mayor plan to reopen economies gradually to avoid a second wave of infections. The epidemic is in sharp decline in New York state, where Cuomo said 161 people had died in the past 24 hours, down from the single day high of 799 in early April.Ĭuomo also announced that from Friday low-risk recreational activities such as tennis and drive-in cinemas would be permitted statewide. Right now, that takes us into June," de Blasio said. "We need to see it sustained in a deeper way. He said data on deaths and hospitalizations was "definitely trending in the right direction" but needed to fall further before Big Apple residents could get back to work. However, New York City, the epicenter of America's epidemic, will not be able to start getting its economy up and running again this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters. "We start a new chapter today," Cuomo told reporters, adding, "It's an exciting new phase, we're all anxious to get back to work." He said three regions had met criteria-including on declining death rates, hospital beds and testing capacity-to restart construction, manufacturing and curbside retail when the order expires Friday. COVID-19 has killed around 22,000 people in New York state, which has been shut down since Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered all non-essential businesses ordered closed on March 22.
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