The Apocalypse is presented in the New York city borough of Queens, in bright sunshine. Once a day I dare to take a walk. Because currently, there is a risk to leave the house. The infection rate in my neighborhood is one of the highest in all of New York City. I woke up to the worried messages from my friends and family from Germany, and in the morning news, the term “epicenter of the Virus fell several times”.
As I leave the house, I expect Chaos, at least a burning trash can. But it is quiet and warm, the trees are in bloom, and because there are fewer cars on the road than usual, I can hear the birds singing. My neighbors have a barbecue in the front yard and play loud music. You share your Apartment with three generations, as they take advantage of every Chance to get out.
The photos of the empty Times Square and the deserted Fifth Avenue, and go around the world. But in Manhattan, and Manhattan is for New York not to be representative. Social Distancing in the borough of Queens is different. Here, too, there are empty streets and lowered the shutters, but in some corners of life still rages.
New York City is not only Manhattan
In Manhattan, around 1.6 million people. Alone in Brooklyn, with 2.5 million significantly more, albeit on a larger area. Also, Queens is still a Manhattan, with 2.2 million inhabitants, with the addition of 1.9 million people in the Bronx, and Staten Island. Demographics and standard of living districts in all of New York city is very different.
About 18 percent of New Yorkers live below the poverty line. The average for Manhattan and are 16 percent. In the Bronx, is 28 percent. In each of the neighborhoods, the proportion is even greater. In Brownsville, Brooklyn, the lives of 40 per cent below the poverty line. More than 70 percent of the residents there are African-American. For comparison: On the affluent Upper East Side in Manhattan, the poverty rate is six percent, where 1.4 per cent of the inhabitants are black, 75 percent white.
The infection rates in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens are much higher than in Manhattan. The epidemic makes the gap between rich and poor even greater. In the New York Subway, people on the go who can’t afford their life to just a few weeks on break. They often have no health insurance, and Jobs that you can do from home.
in Addition, the skin often color, who is poor and who is rich, and, in consequence, who stays healthy and who catches it. The Coronavirus infects and kills African-Americans in the United States disproportionately, writes the “New York Times” that showed the data of several States and large cities.
Queens: Loud music and respirators
That the Home Office is a luxury for the White and Wealthy, also in Queens feel. The construction site in my street runs five days per week, on high-operation. Even today, many people are on the road again and shops opened.
From a cheap market on Cypress Avenue, blaring loud music and neon lights flashing in the Windows. Actually, only supermarkets, drugstores and pharmacies may be open, but here there are socks, umbrellas and other consumer goods – and it is full. “We have face masks,” reads a sign at the entrance. An employee there to keep the number of customers in the view of dancing. In his eyes, and wrinkles, I can see that he’s laughing under his breath protection mask. Maybe he is just glad he has not lost his Job like millions of other New Yorkers. There are so many that the site, on which you can apply for unemployment assistance, breaks constantly together.
I want to get in the supermarket, a packet of coffee and fresh fruit, as a girl myself responsive and asks if I can give her and her sister to buy two Cheeseburgers next door at McDonalds. She is wearing neither gloves nor a face mask. I’ll buy her instead of the Cheeseburger, a respiratory protection mask, and give her cash. The idea, at McDonalds waiting in line, is a little tempting.
The sun is now in a deep and colorful flags flutter in front of a furniture shop in the Wind. New York City would not be hit by this Virus, it would be a lovely spring day. It is warm and some of the people standing in front of the Liberty Department Store in the queue, and have tied their Jackets around the waist. I’m sweating under my mask respirator. The queue in front of the Department store, pulling up to the street corner. People seem to want to buy right now is a shelf unit, or Bluetooth speakers.
At the Cypress Avenue are open between many of the closed stores individual transactions. Restaurants may prepare food, either for pickup or delivery. Small pharmacies are open, with strict instructions that only one Person is allowed to occur. A pharmacist has holed up behind a plastic tarp. Breathing masks she had enough, she says to my demand.
The district is to always
change, I walk past the little Patisserie that I’ve eaten in the last summer so much strawberry cake, and the cafe in which I sit sometimes and write Then the little hardware store in there is my pipe cleaner, and the Deli, I buy morning Bagels and coffee filter comes. I’m afraid that some of these stores will never open again – to big the economic damage is. This will cost Jobs and even more poverty.
A postal worker pushes a cart full of letters in front of it. A mesh wire fence, an old man is waiting. Before she gives him his Post, it stretches the thumbs up. It acts as a small thanks. Maybe he wants to tell her but only that they should comply with the two-Meter safety distance.
A Jogger without respiratory protection mask comes up to me. As she sees me, she pulls her scarf over the mouth and nose. I’m gonna stop so you can walk a safe distance past me. It touches me that we want to protect each other. In front of each other.
a Lot is different in the district and throughout the city, since the outbreak of the Corona-pandemic – and there were many here before, incorrectly. I hope that we can do things better, if the curve of new Infections is no longer flattens out, if the hospitals are overcrowded and the beds and ventilators are in short supply. If no refrigerated vehicles with more bodies in front of the hospitals.
The pandemic exposed the disastrous state of the health system. Education needs to be affordable, so that more people can find better paying Jobs and health insurance, afford to be without high levels of debt. To say it with the words of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo: “This is a Moment that will change this Nation.” And that needs to change also, it shoots me through the head.
Before I want to turn into my street, I see that the flower has opened for business. The florist asked if I wanted to buy a bouquet. There is money for roses excerpt seems to me to be absurd, now – but it is questionable whether there will be the small Shop with the plastic flowers at the entrance in a few months at all. I’m a bit nostalgic and buying him a bouquet. With flowers in his Arm and a breathing mask on the face, I walk home.
author: Sophie Schimansky
*The post “in Spite of Corona: New York sleeps” is published by Deutsche Welle. Contact with the executives here.
Deutsche Welle
