May 4, 2020 Issue

The New Yorker’s coronavirus coverage continues to impress immensely. Of its many superb pieces – Peter Hessler’s “Life on Lockdown,” Adam Gopnik’s “Abundance of Caution,” Siddhartha Mukherjee’s “The One and the Many,” Rivka Galchen’s “The Longest Shift,” Jonathan Blitzer’s “Juan Sanabria” – perhaps the most striking and original (so far) is “April 15, 2020,” in this week’s issue. It's a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York City, the epicenter of the pandemic, written by twenty-five New Yorker reporters and illustrated (in the online version) by seventeen photographers. 

Comprising thirty-two snapshots of life in the city, the piece is structured chronologically, beginning “soon after midnight” at John F. Kennedy Airport and ending twenty-four hours later at Lower Manhattan Hospital. In between, it visits, among other places, Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach (“The labyrinthine streets of Brighton Beach were so unbusy you could forget the sidewalks and wander in the middle of them anywhere”); the Amazon fulfilment center on Staten Island (“Previously, masked employees wielding thermometer guns had taken co-workers’ temperatures as they entered the four-story building; now an automated system was in place”); the Hudson Theatre near Times Square (“A drained wash of yellowish light came from a single bulb on the lip of the stage”); the Montefiore Medical Center, in the Bronx (“Urgent codes rang out on the P.A. system: ‘Rapid response,’ for when a patient can’t breathe; ‘C.A.C.,’ for cardiac arrest”); the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“But, that morning, as daffodils bloomed and cherry trees shed pink petals onto sidewalks all over the city, the urns stood empty”); the American Museum of Natural History (“In individual containers on a sunny windowsill, a dozen large garden spiders sat in their webs”); the Herald Square subway station (“An elderly woman dozed behind a phone-charging kiosk, sitting on a suitcase, leaning against a well-filled shopping cart, her head nodding”); an I.C.U. at Weill Cornell Medicine (“Bright fluorescent lights; on the bed, a gaunt man with paper-white hair, age seventy-five. Intubated. His skin was nearly translucent”); the top floor of an East Village walkup (“Near the window, Fredericks tuned his electric guitar—a teal-blue Bobkat with a Stratocaster neck”); Sherman’s Flatbush Memorial Chapel, in Midwood, Brooklyn (“Inside, four tables held eight bodies, some of them in scuffed orange pouches from the hospital, others in clear sleeves no thicker than garbage bags”); on a tugboat on the north shore of Staten Island (“With its nearly seven-thousand-horsepower engines and azimuth propeller, it can go forward, backward, and sideways, or spin like a top on the water”).

“She wore a high-visibility vest, and her eyes danced brightly above a blue mask” – I relish sentences like that. “April 15, 2020” brims with them.

My favourite part is the visit to Russ & Daughters on East Houston Street. The reporter (is it Helen Rosner?) describes the aroma inside the shop: “The next day, the air was perfumed with a familiar smell—smoky, briny, yeasty-sweet—tinged with a jagged note of surface cleaner.” The quotation at the end made me smile:

Tupper regarded the assemblage as it came together on the counter. “This is a small little order,” he said. “But you know, right now, if someone wants a quarter pound of whitefish salad, we’re doing whatever we can.”

Whoever conceived the idea of this brilliant mosaic portrait of twenty-four hours in the life of NYC as it struggles to deal with the pandemic is a genius. Bravo, New Yorker!

Postscript: The online version of “April 15, 2020” is a remarkable photo text, featuring forty-five still images and four short video loops. The photos and videos don’t appear to depict people or scenes mentioned in the text, but they certainly complement it. Like the text, they document New York's coronavirus reality. Many of them are artfully matter-of-fact. For example:

Andre D. Wagner, "11:50 A.M., Williamsburg, Brooklyn"

Joseph Michael Lopez, "2:53 P.M., West Farms, the Bronx"

Dina Litovsky, "9:58 P.M., Times Square"

My favourite “April 15, 2020” illustration is Sam Youkilis’s “10:13 A.M., Tribeca,” a transfixing fifteen second video loop showing a masked florist assembling a bouquet of purple lilacs – the visual equivalent of a lyric poem. My eyes devour it.