Sophie: walking empty streets in New York

Sophie Friedman is a freelance journalist based in New York where she oversees Michelin's travel guidebooks. Her work and photos have appeared in dozens of publications, including AFAR, Fodor’s, and the Wall Street Journal. She has contributed to nearly 20 guidebooks, covering Ecuador to Burma. She's now planning her next move. Reach her at sophie.friedman@gmail.com or on Instagram @sophiefriedman.

I should have seen COVID-19 coming. I lived in Shanghai for six years; I remember Swine Flu. Plastic sheeting covered the buttons in lifts, which were sanitised hourly. Now I’m back in New York, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak in the US. I wish I were in Shanghai. I long for a government to be in control, taking control of the situation and sorting it out, instead of in the US, a runaway train-wreck doomed to crash and burn.

And yet, despite a five-week lockdown with no end in sight, I wake up happy every day. There are ample silver linings. I’m a freelance travel journalist, abroad 250+ days a year. This is the longest consecutive period of time I’ve spent in New York since 2009 when I was in uni. I have never seen New York so empty of life, and it’s oddly amazing. The streets are dead quiet now—no traffic, very few people. Walking in my downtown Manhattan neighbourhood one day, I was shocked to realise the only sound was birds chirping. Now I wake to them every day, and the trills and warbles make the loveliest soundtrack for my walks or long bike rides.

And oh, the biking! With so little traffic, we cyclists now rule the road, cruising across three-lane avenues, coasting through a vacant Times Square. Last week I cycled to Brooklyn for a food swap: I’d made harissa and was in turn handed rectangles of a focaccia named Luigi. It was a rare warm day, 18ºC and sunny, and as I flew down the slope of the Manhattan Bridge, I felt incredibly light and free, as if I’d escaped.

An extreme extrovert, I knew I had to make a plan to get through this. I started leading early morning HIIT classes for a few friends, every morning. We sweat and huff through the workout and, at the end, discuss mundanities like what we’re having for breakfast. At the weekends I meet friends for sidewalk chats, and on a rather cold, grey day, one appeared outside like a mirage, bearing an enormous chocolate chip cookie, hot out of the oven.

And I have my neighbours. The highlight of the day for us is the 7pm clap for essential workers. Several dozen of us go up onto our rooftops or hang out our windows and just go wild: shaking tambourines, clapping, whooping, banging on pots and pans, waving to each other. My neighbour directly across, John Maynard, aged 76, plays bagpipes every night. This encouraged someone on my side of the street to start playing drums in tune with John. This is the only time of the day most of us go outside and see other people, and the rooftop clapping has engendered a real sense of camaraderie. We never miss it.

New Yorkers have a reputation for being gruff, but the next time someone says we’re mean, I want them to remember that more than eight million of us have stayed inside our tiny apartments for weeks on end. We’re doing it to protect our friends, our neighbours, the people who collect our rubbish, the guy who does our dry cleaning, the woman who makes al pastor tacos at the little Mexican deli. Stacked densely on top of millions of others, New Yorkers are used to putting society above self, something inherent in China but not so in the US. I am disgusted and ashamed by the US, but of my fellow New Yorkers, I feel proud.