This is something that I started writing on April 1st of 2020 but never turned into a full post. I think it was shortly after this that I started working full time for the 2020 Census and I got sidetracked. It’s nothing unusual, but still interesting to see what I was thinking about back then, during the height of the pandemic in New York City. Unsurprisingly, I was concerned about toilet paper.
Coronavirus Journal: Day 28 – Impact areas and hoarding in the city
People in poorer neighborhoods are being harder hit, but they’re also less likely to hoard.
Cheap toilet paper in stock. Everything isn’t being immediately wiped out. It’s amazing, because this area is one of the harder hit areas of the city. It’s an area where people are still boarding the train every day to head to work because they work in essential services. They’re being infected in the trains.
I live in one of the hardest hit areas in the city and the country for COVID-19 and I think it’s because most of the people that live in this area work in industries that kept going during the pandemic, so close contact in public transportation and at work kept transmission rates high.
According to current CDC data, transmission, hospitalizations, and deaths are down, despite people mostly giving up on masking and the lack of interest in booster shots. I imagine the numbers are trending downward because more people are developing some level of immunity. I’d also read previously that viruses tend to evolve into less lethal forms to ensure their own survival as well, so maybe that has something to do with it.
I have a feeling COVID-19 is going to be around for the long-haul now, like other serious illnesses. We’re going to have to figure out how to mentally accommodate that knowledge while we get back to living our lives.
Almost a year ago, on October 1st, 2020, I submitted an application to work for the Board of Elections in New York City. I figured it would be interesting to actually work on an election day. Plus, I’d heard it was pretty good money. I cut it a little too close to work on the 2020 general election (and maybe that was a blessing in disguise considering how contentious it was), and I never heard back about training, so I sort of gave up on the idea.
Today, I got an email about attending training on Thursday in the late afternoon. It’s strange that the notice was so short, but it fits my schedule because I work early mornings. I’m going to go check it out and see what they’re offering. I took a look at the election schedule and the upcoming election is on November 2nd, which is a Tuesday. Being honest, if the hours required conflict with my regular job and doesn’t pay as much, it isn’t going to be worthwhile, even for the experience of participating in the democratic process in a more involved way.
Just in case anyone was curious, this is what an official absentee military ballot looked like for residents of Bronx County, New York City, for the 2020 general election.
I wound up not using it. I went to the polling station and voted in person. I was doing some house cleaning, found it, and thought it might be useful to someone in the future.
Living in the Bronx is exciting. You never know what you’re going to see when you go outside or even when you look out your window at 4 AM. For example, early last Thursday morning I saw a river where I expected to see an avenue.
4 AM Thursday Morning
A water main break at 175th Street was causing major flooding. The water main that broke was cast iron, 48″ across, and was installed in 1909. It’s kind of hard to believe that something installed in 1909 was still holding up considering all of the traffic that rolls across Jerome every day and the vibrations from the elevated 4 train. Maybe this will encourage local politicians to address the traffic issue in this area.
Jerome Avenue sits in a depression that I’ve always wondered about. Was it a river in the past that was converted into a roadway? Or just a natural valley? Regardless, it is now a major thoroughfare in the Bronx both for vehicles and for an elevated train line. That worked to funnel the water towards I-95, which sits at an even lower elevation and crosses under Jerome Ave a block away.
Eight people were trapped in their cars and nearby streets were underwater early Thursday when a water main break flooded the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major New York City highway. Emergency workers came to the drivers’ rescue. https://t.co/J8PKOkHHg9
I can’t say I was completely unhappy to see the street flooding, even though I was worried about my car and the impact on local businesses that I frequent. This stretch of Jerome Avenue is usually filthy. It needed a good wash. It needs a second wash for good measure, but I don’t suppose that’s going to happen anytime soon. Maybe when the two new buildings that are going up are finished and new people and businesses start moving into the neighborhood? I have hopes that this section of the Bronx, being right on a train line and with quick access to two major highways, will be vastly improved over the next year or so.
Anyway, looking out of my window at 4 AM, I could see that the water was hip deep and rising. Cars parked along the avenue were already half-submerged. What I couldn’t quite figure out is why the water seemed to be so deep between 177th Street and 175th Street, but was almost completely absent from 175th Street down towards I-95. I could see emergency workers standing in the road there. The difference in elevation from one block to the next isn’t that severe.
Thursday Evening
Later that evening I went out to get groceries and to look around. Most of the businesses along that stretch were closed or people were using pumps to remove water from the basements. I could see people in El Gran Valle on the corner of 176th and Jerome looking around and shaking their heads like they were dealing with a lost cause.
The road itself was covered with mud and there were emergency work crews surrounding huge holes in the intersection of 175th Street and Jerome, in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts. A reporter, Naveen Dhaliwal from Channel 7 I think, was on the corner. It looked like she was getting ready for the following news segment:
Friday
People clearing damaged items out of businesses on Friday afternoon.
Today (Friday), more than 48 hours later, water was still being pumped out of the basements of businesses and workers at a church and bodega were hauling damaged equipment, furniture, and other odds & ends out to the curb for disposal. Between the physical and fire damage from the riots and this week’s flooding, the area is really taking a beating. I can’t help but wonder if the damage was done intentionally to try to clear out some of these businesses so that more new buildings can be erected.
One last thing I wanted to note. ConEdison has closed Jerome Avenue between 176th Street and 175th Street for repairs. Today, some overly clever clown got out of his car, moved the cones, and drove down Jerome anyway. He was forced to turn around both by ConEdison workers and by the lack of a road in the 175th Street intersection. People really are something else in the Bronx.
Let me ask you this: if someone walked up to you in the street and offered you $1,091, would you say “No thanks”? According to a George Washington University report, every person that failed to respond to the 2010 Census cost their state an average of $1,091 dollars.
People complain about their communities all the time, especially in the Bronx. The Bronx is one of the worst off areas in the entire country. But people also don’t want to do anything to improve their situation, even when doing it is free.
You use public transportation, the school systems, the hospitals, the roads. Maybe you get EBT (food stamps). Maybe your Mom is elderly and gets some sort of medical assistance. You get a lot of services, but those services don’t just appear from thin air. Someone has to pay for that, right? They’re all partially funded by the federal government.
How does the federal government determine how much money to send to each community? The Census! The Census Bureau counts people, removes personal details, and releases statistics to the rest of the government for the purposes of allocating funding and determining representation in the House of Representatives.
It’s pretty simple. The more people that get counted, the more federal funding your community gets relative to the rest of the country. So if you don’t complete the census, you’re cheating yourself and your community out of essential services. You’re cheating your parents. You’re cheating your children.
It doesn’t matter if the government has your social security number. It doesn’t matter if you’re on welfare and they “already know where you at”. That’s not how the government works.
If you want that money, if you want your neighborhood to improve, then you have to respond to the census. If you don’t, then funding for services and/or programs that you use could get cut and/or run out before funding is reallocated after the 2030 Census. This only happens once every 10 years.
Completing the census is more important than voting. When you vote, the politician that gets in office does whatever they want regardless of what they promised during their campaign, but when you complete the census, the government has no choice but to allocate funds according to the count and give your area more seats in the House of Representatives if that’s how the numbers play out. That’s just how it works.
Why do I care so much? Because people being willfully stupid bothers me. Because when I hear someone say, “No thanks” when a census taker asks them to complete the Census, that response is so stupid that it just stays with me. They’re not selling you something. They’re trying to give you something that you need. All you have to do is spend 5-7 minutes and take it.
Only 55% of New Yorkers have responded to the census, but guaranteed next year someone who didn’t bother to respond will be complaining about how the federal government doesn’t do enough to help poor communities like the Bronx.
Since this COVID-19 thing started in New York City, people have been panic buying. One dude buying 20 jars of spaghetti sauce, every shelf in the store is now empty, kind of panic buying. Or at least, that’s how it was down in Manhattan near my mom’s place.
At the two grocery stores near our apartment in the Bronx, everything has been pretty regular in terms of availability. For a few days, the grocery stores were out of ginger. The liquid hand soap was gone from one of two grocery stores for a week. The TP was gone for a few days, but then was restocked. Now, one grocery store has TP and the other doesn’t.
It doesn’t seem like a hoarding issue so much as a supply issue at this point. In the last month, people bought three or more months worth the toilet paper instead of what they would normally buy, so there’s just a shortage coming out of the factories. A self-fulfilling TP shortage.
The food shelves were never totally emptied here. I can tell sales are good though, because I haven’t seen a damn thing on sale at Key Foods for two weeks. I’d like to go to Walmart in NJ, but with the way people are talking, I’m not sure there’d be anything there to buy. Or maybe there’s a line? Or maybe it’s going to be full of people passing the virus around to each other?
I get why people hoard now, though. When they first started, I didn’t understand it. It looked like people were just being stupid, but I’ve been thinking about it and I realized that some people must literally have bought enough so they could go in their house and not come out for weeks or months, because they have the money for it and a job that allows them to work from home. And, given that almost 300 people are dying a day in New York City right now, maybe that was the right move after all. The more you limit your exposure, the more likely you are to not die in the next few months.
Not dying due to exposure to the pandemic has become a class privilege. Just like Cuomo freezing mortgages but not rents. Apparently, renters are supposed to magically pull rent out of their butts even if they haven’t been working, but home owners have to be protected. Even though they’re in the minority.
It doesn’t seem like people in this part of the Bronx are as prone to hoarding as people in other neighborhoods. We’ve discussed whether it’s because of culture, not recognizing the seriousness of the pandemic, or because people in this area just can’t afford to buy multiple weeks or months of groceries all at once in advance. Maybe it’s a bit of all three.
Only the off-brand stuff is left.
Anyway, the shelves are finally starting to look a little bare in the TP section now. Paper towels too. We still bought the same was what we’d normally buy. We have actual towels that we can use instead of paper towels and if we run out of TP, we can wash our butts in the shower.
So, I was sitting at the dinner table, trying to get some remote work done and I saw something moving out of the corner of my eye, out the window. I looked over and saw a black bird, a crow, standing on the antennae of the neighboring building.
Ok. Great. A crow. I felt like it fit really well with the current mood in the city and the country. We are the new Italy. We are the new global epicenter of death and coronavirus related destruction, so a crow seemed really appropriate. Hell, the scientific name for a crow is even “corvus”. Coronavirus.
But then he turned and looked at me and I realized the fucker was holding half a hotdog in his beak.
He hopped around, turning this way and that, as if he was gloating over his prize. He must have realized I was watching him because he stopped and starting eyeballing me. He tipped his head back and forth and then decided to move to safer ground, just in case I felt inclined to go out the window after him to challenge him for his hotdog.
The crow turning and preparing to take flight, like the number of coronavirus related deaths in the US.
The fact that the crow was holding half a hotdog in his beak just made the imagery better for me. Here was a representation of death holding a hotdog and chilling outside, the American coronavirus mascot.
I could almost hear him screaming, “HOLD MY BEER! USA! USA! WhooooooOOOooo!” as he flew up and away, out of our control.
You look at what Governor Cuomo is saying, and especially Mayor De Blasio, and you’d think that death is literally stalking the streets, as if it would be like this if you went outside:
But instead, it’s almost like nothing is going on at all. I think people are mostly not traveling out of their neighborhoods if they can, especially on the trains, but people are out on the streets in force, especially now that it’s the weekend.
Heading downtown yesterday to 86th Street, the train actually felt crowded for 1:30 PM. On the way home, the platform was mostly empty, but the uptown 4 was standing room only when it arrived. It definitely wasn’t as crowded as it normally is at 2:50 PM, but it was still shoulder-to-shoulder.
The uptown 4 train platform at 86th street on Friday afternoon 3/20/2020, almost completely empty of people
I think this says a lot about neighborhoods and socio-economics in New York City. People from the Bronx have to take the trains because most people from the Bronx don’t have jobs that they can do from home. You don’t see a lot of people getting on the train at 86th Street because most of the people that live in that area are able to stay home and/or work from home.
Proving the point, the train heading out of the Bronx this afternoon (Saturday) was almost empty.
An empty 4 train on Saturday afternoon, 3/21/2020. Photo credit: Marie Farless
86th Street and Central Park are are both packed, though. My wife couldn’t believe how many people are out. She said it looks like a regular weekend, as if nothing is going on.
A large crowd of people jogging and walking in Central Park today, 3/21/2020. Photo credit: Marie FarlessPeople in Central Park today, Saturday 3/21/2020. Photo credit: Marie Farless
You’d think most people would be at home or at least keeping their distance from each other, but they’re all bunched up in crowds.
I look at these people and think to myself, they’re out there huffing and puffing and blasting viruses into the air and then the next person is going to run through that. I read that coronavirus can hang around in the air for 3 hours, so if you’re running behind someone carrying the virus, you’re probably screwed, especially if there’s no breeze, but you won’t know it for about two weeks and in the meantime you’ll be infecting everyone you know and come in contact with.
Anyway, based on what Cuomo was saying today, everything except essential services will be shut down as of 8 PM Sunday night. I wonder if that means restaurants too? No more take-out? No more delivery? No more runs to the liquor store?
A liqour shop on Ave B and 14th Street in Manhattan, NYC with plastic sheeting and a table at the front door, creating a makeshift take-out window.
I wonder if that will push more people into panic buying at grocery stores today and tomorrow? And if more people will be congregating in parks afterwards?
A little history of Central Park…
Anyway, this situation with Central Park reminds me of when and why the park was originally built. In 1850, wealthy merchants and landowners argued that they needed somewhere to go for scenic carriage rides in the city. Another argument they presented to justify the expense of creating the park was that it would give working class people a healthy alternative to going to the saloons and hanging around in the streets.
Before Central Park was built, people just had nowhere to go besides their ratty tenements, the streets, or the bars. Battery Park didn’t exist at the time. Neither did the paths along the rivers. Those were all shipping docks and commercial areas, or simply didn’t exist because the land reclamation hadn’t been done yet.
Central Park probably didn’t work out that well for working class people back in the day because working class people wouldn’t have been able to afford the transit cost to get to there. Travel was harder and more expensive compared to wages at the time.
Everything is getting shut down
Now, with the coronavirus pandemic, people have nowhere to go because the “saloons” and other restaurants are closed so they’re finally gathering in Central Park and probably other parks across the city. After Sunday, even more businesses are going to be closed so that’s even more people with time on their hands and maybe heading to the park. I imagine it won’t be too much longer before Central Park is closed too.
We started out with gatherings limited to 500, then 50, then 10, and now you can’t even have a 5 person game of basketball according to Cuomo. De Blasio is calling for the military to be brought in. It looks like they’re pushing for martial law and De Blasio has been fighting to restrict people to their homes since last week.
I get that COVID-19 is serious, but it seems like the response they’re demanding is exaggerated. With about 45,000 tests done, New York City has found about 6,200 people that already have the virus. That doesn’t really tell us much about how rapidly the virus is spreading in the city because the testing is still trying to catch up to the actual number of people that are already infected. But let’s say there are 10,000 cases in New York City. That’s about 0.12% of the city’s population of ~8.4 million.
I suppose they’re trying to prevent New York from winding up like Italy, but if the bar is so low, I wonder what’s going to count in terms of successfully overcoming the current situation. What I mean is, how few people have to have the virus before we can all get back to our regular lives?
And, more importantly, how are the state and federal governments going to overcome the economic hurdle they’re creating?
De Blasio, Cuomo, and the Federal Government need to figure out what they’re going to do when this situation drags on for weeks and months. People really aren’t going to be able to pay their bills. Putting a moratorium on evictions/utility cutoffs/etc. doesn’t even help, because once the moratorium is up, the evictions and cutoffs will start. You can’t expect people to suddenly have money after 3 months of not working just because the virus is gone and you declare the moratorium to be over. This situation is going to turn into a disaster. And maybe even sooner than 3 months if people run out of money to buy food.
I was downtown in the East Village this afternoon. I was a little excited to see what was happening down there. I also had to get a power cable we need for a work monitor and I wanted to drop some stuff off at my Mom’s place.
I keep going outside with this expectation that the city is going to look completely deserted, like it did in downtown Manhattan after Hurricane Sandy. It was creepy as hell at night back then because there was no power downtown. We had to use flashlights to get around and one night, it looked like my wife and I were the only two people on 14th Street for two blocks in either direction.
Today, though, you wouldn’t think anything out of the ordinary was going on. It just looked like a typical afternoon. Maybe a Sunday afternoon instead of a Tuesday afternoon, though. And there was noticeably less traffic on the road for a weekday. But there were plenty of people out and about and only a few of them were wearing masks.
I wore an N95 mask while outside today. It was kind of nice because people gave me a lot of extra space on the train bench, platforms, buses and on the street, just in case I was sick I guess. I might keep wearing an N95 mask for a while after this thing dies down!
It’s hard to reconcile what I’m seeing on the street with what I’m hearing in the news about Italy. Who knows how bad this will all get here, though? I read that cases of corona virus more than doubled to over 1200 between last night and this morning. I doubt things have even come close to peaking in terms of the virus running its course.
I went with my Mom over to C-Town on Avenue C. I think she asked me to come with her just in case the crowds were more than she could handle on her own. It wasn’t too bad when we got there but it’s like the crowd followed us.
The near-empty bread shelves at C-Town
The shelves were just about wiped out of pasta, fresh cut meat, bread, tortillas, canned soup, and some varieties of cooking and olive oils.
The tortillas were wiped out at C-Town
I still can’t understand what the hell people are thinking down there. I didn’t bother to check to see if they had liquid hand soap or toilet paper. We don’t need any.
Toilet paper and paper towels at Key Foods in the BronxHand soap at Key Foods in the Bronx
In the Bronx, by contrast, the stores are still relatively well stocked. The shelves at my two local groceries were empty of bottled water and some hand soaps, but there is plenty of toilet paper, paper towels, and more importantly fresh fruits and vegetables.
Plenty of tortillas available at Key Foods in the Bronx too
I’m a little curious to know how this is all going to play out. I mean, Trump is saying this corona virus situation is going to continue through July or August. New York City is limiting gatherings to 50 or less and pretty much all venues are closed. Restaurants are limited to take out and delivery. Gyms are closed.
Can businesses afford to be closed until August? Can people who work in the service industry afford to be out of a job for 5 months?
I saw on Twitter than the government is talking about dropping some cash on the masses, but the figure they’re throwing around is $1000.00. For a large portion of the country that might be ok if the situation only lasts 2 weeks. In New York City that isn’t even rent, even in the bad parts of town. It certainly isn’t going to do anything to help people who suffer from underemployment or unemployment for 5 months.
Not that I’m surprised, but with the economic situation this dire, most people are losing their minds because Trump referred to COVID-19 corona virus as the Chinese Flu. So what? No one cries that the 1918 flu is called Spanish Flu. And we all know it came from China. It doesn’t even matter what it’s called. If people want to be ignorant and abuse Chinese people, they’re going to do it regardless of what you call the virus.
People seem to like getting themselves bogged down in minor battles over ideological purity. They lose the forest for the trees. And I think Trump does this stuff just to troll people. I think he trolls people just like other trolls troll people and for the same reason. Imagine the rush you would get if you could make millions of people have fits over a word choice that isn’t even offensive because it might, maybe, possibly, cause someone to be mean to Chinese people.
I don’t even care. I’m going to ride this out and then I’m going to head to Chinatown and pig out.
BTW, here are some pro-tips for people out panic buying:
I went outside today for the first time since Thursday. It was quiet. Unusually quiet. There wasn’t even much traffic on Jerome Avenue, which was strange for that time of day. It was just me, a guy in a mask and gloves in front of the liquor store, and two people begging for money by the train stairs.
I think the bubonic plague could hit New York City and that woman would still be sitting by the subway stairs asking if anyone has a quarter, though. She’s something special.
Antillana on Jerome Ave has toilet paper. It has paper towels. There are plenty of canned goods too. But there’s no bottled water, which I thought was weird because even in China, Italy, and Spain, the hardest hit areas of the world, they never cut off the water. At least, I never heard that they did. I don’t understand the obsession with buying toilet paper either. Toilet paper isn’t going to save anyone from the virus. And you can wash your butt in the shower if you run out of TP.
Antillana was pretty empty. It felt like an ordinary Sunday evening, though the customers seemed a bit edgy. They had everything I was looking for except bananas. Their bananas were there on display but they were all brown and rotten. Not sure why they left them out. I figure even people who are panic buying aren’t going to buy something that’s rotten. Probably.
Key Food up the hill was quite a bit busier than usual, but still not all that crowded. Not like how I expected it to be. I found some nice bananas there. They seemed to be low on red onions, which struck me as strange. I bought a sweet onion. Not because I was panic buying. We’re just low on onions.
I’m not sure what I expected. You’d think the world was ending based on the images of empty store shelves, fights over toilet paper, and all the closures. I got an update while I was out saying that the public schools are going to be closed through the end of April. The libraries are closed too. I had this feeling while I was on the street that at any moment, a zombie horde might show up and start chasing me. I’m not used to seeing the streets that empty.
I guess this is all about “flattening the curve”.
I saw a politician on Twitter saying that all the restaurants and bars in New York City should be ordered closed, but I don’t see that happening. Not unless the city agrees to discount every business a month’s property taxes or reimburse a month’s rent, plus lost income. And the city would have to agree to reimburse all of the employees for lost wages or something.
A lot of people in New York City and, I imagine, the rest of the country, live paycheck to paycheck. That’s probably especially true here where rent is about $1500 a month even in poor neighborhoods.
You close a business for a month and you make a bunch of people homeless or at risk of homelessness. You cause people to default on credit card payments and miss an electric payment or car payment.
Corona virus hasn’t even hit New York City that hard but it’s already emphasizing the wealth disparity that exists and how dangerous it is for the economy as a whole. You can’t hoard wealth at the top if you want to keep making money. Money has to flow through all segments of the society to keep the economy moving. That’s just how it is. Does it matter how many yachts you can buy if your actions tank the country’s economy and your money no longer has value?
Anyway, I’m going to be heading downtown tomorrow. I’m excited to see how things are in Manhattan.
Bradley Farless 