Hot City: New Yorkers celebrate a special summer in the city

In mid-June, a photo of long-awaited New York City Mayor Maya Wiley with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, without masks, hugged members of the rock band The Strokes in front of hundreds of flashy fans appeared on Instagram. They were at Irving Plaza to do New York’s first full indoor concert in over a year. In every post that happened that night, New Yorkers were adamant: “New York is back!”

The city, of course, is not completely “behind” as we remember it. Hotels only occupy 50%, according to analyst STR. Broadway is still almost completely closed and is likely to be open until September, while white-collar office workers move sporadically to Midtown.

But the culture? Culture explodes in the seams. On June 15, Governor Andrew Cuomo get up virtually all restrictions on the state. As the country reopens, New Yorkers are finally freer to leave, making the trips we dreamed of in quarantine: the Grand Canyon, Miami, Puerto Rico. But, interestingly, many young New Yorkers choose to stay and enjoy the awakening of their city. This summer, New York is a playground for New Yorkers.

“New York won’t be like this again,” a friend tells me who takes a drink and pulls out her phone so she can share a Google calendar. The goal is to protect the city as much as possible this summer. “Every weekend we leave,” she says, slightly stressed, “it’s a weekend we lack magic!”

And it’s magical: on a Sunday afternoon I’m cramped among hundreds of strangers Dance! New York, dancing with Justin Strauss, a 40-year-old party on the New York DJ scene. One weekend in the afternoon, I pass by the Whitney Museum, almost completely free of tourists, and I am left with empty rooms. Dawoud Beyphotographs of black america and Julie mehretuimmense abstract maps that consume everything. A guard smiles sitting on a stool. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he says. “The museum has been reopened like everything else, but it sure is still quiet.”

What you see now is that New Yorkers are ready to reclaim their city, to enjoy it. ”

On Little Island, a whimsical new park floating on the Hudson River at 14th Street, I’m one of more than 400,000 people I’ve visited since it opened in May. The park cost $ 260 million to build and $ 0 to visit. Families take a tour of the roads, speaking languages ​​I can’t locate. We’re all halfway through a photo shoot, capturing not only the view, but us and each other, now New York is an attractive Instagram backdrop for our comeback.

On Saturdays from 4pm to midnight, people gather at Queens Night Market at Flushing’s Corona Park, where independent vendors sell food and art in New York’s most famous cultural breeze. Visitors crowd together, glancing at old school funk while tasting Tibetan mushrooms. jhalmuri wrapped in a Bengali, Portuguese newspaper flame cakes and from Malaysia tan toasted bread. Sellers carry twice the expected product and are sold.

In the Meatpacking district, an immersive outdoor Broadway production has emerged Seven deadly sins: seven works of ten minutes, each based on a sin (pride, greed, envy, etc.), each represented in different shop windows of seven empty shop windows.

We listen with headphones, the sounds and sirens of the city pass inside. We laugh, whisper and wipe away tears. The quality of plays varies, but does it matter? It’s live theater on an imaginative stage and we’re side by side with other New Yorkers, tourists in our city.

The reappearance of New York is a cat-and-ear game of cat and mouse. Where do you dance? What is open until 4 in the morning? What’s back? Which streets are closed and when?

Sit alone to tie your shoe and, within five minutes, keep the conversation going

The weekends, Vanderbilt Avenue in Brooklyn it is closed to vehicles. His neighborhood association raised funds to continue last year’s city’s Open Streets program, so restaurants could spill over and musicians could perform. On the Lower East Side, bars are raised. A neighborhood that was previously lost in white for 20 years, is full of people of all ages and races, pressed against each other, strangely less gentrified.

And strangers, now they talk. A lot. Sit alone to tie your shoe, and within five minutes, you’ll be able to talk deeply about cryptography or therapy or the things you bought in your quarantine.

On a Thursday in Crown Heights, a new live music venue and a cafe called Wild Birds is already packed at 6 p.m. They opened in March 2020 and were maintained during the winter selling plants and wine. Co-owner Luke Bonner is gathering tips for the first of his three musical acts that night, an Afro-Latin jazz band. When he comes to my table, I tell him I’m writing about the reopening of New York and that his eyes are getting big. “Don’t give us too much exposure,” he says laughing. “We can barely keep up with the pace as it is.”

“In my 20 years as a bartender,” says manager Monica Sharp, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

A TikTok New Yorker asks the question in our minds: does this summer in the city feel different for everyone and why do people behave like the stars of their own movie? “Everyone gives energy to the main character,” he whispers to us, to the audience on his phone. “And are you feeling the eye contact or is it me? I can’t just be me. “

“This is one of the advantages that right now there aren’t many international trips, ”says Ian Schrager, the famous New York hotelier and co-founder of Studio 54. World cities can lose sight of their residents in favor of tourists from all over the world,” he explains. jo. “But what you see now are really New Yorkers, New Yorkers par excellence, ready to go crazy, to reclaim their city, to enjoy it.”

At 74, he has just reopened his public hotel on the Lower East Side, with a new Peruvian restaurant, Popular, and a fresh and relevant theme: luxury for everyone. He tells me that our grandparents ’notion of luxury no longer means anything, and that the concept of scarcity is totally obsolete. The pandemic has only driven this to a clearer view.

“Luxury makes you feel good, you treat yourself well, you feel safe and you have the freedom of time,” he says. “And everyone is entitled to it, not just 1 percent.” At Public, there is no man at the reception wearing white gloves and a glass of champagne. In fact, there is no reception.

I ask him about the parallels between this and Studio 54.

“At the nightclub where I started, you don’t have any noticeable product,” he says. “You have the same liquor and music as everyone else. So I learned that what you do to stand out is make people feel good. Studio 54 was successful because people felt free and protected. Everyone was there to have fun. I would see a gay boy in tight jeans and no shirt dancing with a woman dressed in a ballet and a diamond tiara. Are there distinctions of class, demographics, age, wealth, race? Irrelevant. Everyone felt free. Everyone wanted to have a good time. “

That’s how I feel about New York this summer, I tell him. This fun has been democratized in some way: exclusivity has less value, the hierarchy has fallen, and we have come out of this collective trauma only by wanting connection.

He smiles and nods. “You’ve taken a look at that.”

A 40 minute train journey of Public, in Flatbush, downtown Brooklyn, 44-year-old Garnett Phillip is sitting in the corner of her bar, Rogers Garden. Phillip is Trinitarian and Ethiopian, and his bar was inspired by the Caribbean rum bars he has always loved. “Not the high-end ones,” he clarifies. “The real local rum bars. They have bright colors, this galvanized metal, which makes you feel good ”.

The bar is a pandemic success story, opened in July 2020 and has defied the odds of becoming one of Brooklyn’s most popular new neighborhoods, with about 15 seats inside, giving a large garden built to mix. The coveted laws required the bars to serve food, so Phillip built a tiki hut in the garden and lent it to local chefs.

On Thursdays and Saturdays, fans come to Nina Laurient’s fresh lobster, rasta pasta and chicken tails Kitchen Of Mix. Prior to the pandemic, Laurient was a speech therapist, known as a talented cook only for family and friends. When the bar opened, Phillip invited her to the garden. A year later, Laurient has built a cult following and has given up his daily job. He plans to make full-time pop-ups next October and have a restaurant and food truck in the spring.

It was the dream in his head. My DJs here play music, live music outside, everyone dances

“I knew this was my passion and in the long run I would find a way, but never at that pace,” Laurient tells me. “Now I sit in the shack on a Saturday, watching people walk into the street because they know the smell, and I think, wow. Look at what God has given me. It’s one of my wildest dreams. “

Phillip looks tired and relieved. “That Tuesday [last month] that the restrictions were lifted, I looked at my bar and I was very excited, ”he says. “It was full. And since then it has been like this every night. It was the dream in his head. My DJs here playing music, live music outside, everyone dancing, singing, drinking, mixing. ”

She sighs. “This summer is going to be crazy,” he says. “It will be a movie. After what we have experienced, this will be the best summer New York City has had. ”

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