April 10, 2025 • 34 mins
Five years after the start of the COVID pandemic, we revisit journals from the nurses who lived through it. The stories are part of a first draft of history being remembered by the official Manhattan Borough Historian in his new book on New York’s essential workers, “When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers.”
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Straw hut media.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
People got more used to living in isolation during COVID,
and at the same time, they all looked at it really,
really differently, and over time processed COVID in many different
ways and just wanted to forget it. So I think
that if we're going to come to grips with it
and build on it in a positive way, we have
to carefully, cautiously, humanely, generously try to understand what did
(00:37):
happen so that we can move forward from it.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
This is Lucas Grinley from Next City to show about
change makers and their stories. Truth is, there are solutions
to the problems of pressing people in cities. If you're listening,
I hope it's because you want to spread good ideas
from one city to the next city. It's hard to
believe that it's been just over five years since the
start of the pandemic. Five years since we sanitize our groceries,
(01:00):
became zoom super users learned the difference between an N
ninety five and a surgical mask. Five years since our
daily routines were upended and for many life changed in
lasting ways. Everyone was touched by it through illness, loss, isolation,
or the disruption of what we once thought of as normal.
In today's episode, we're doing our best to contribute to
(01:22):
the collective effort that's needed to process what happened. Specifically,
we're revisiting New York City in the earliest days of
COVID nineteen with Robert Snyder. Robert is Manhattan Borough historian.
He's also a professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies
at Rutgers University in Newark. His new book, When the
City Stopped focuses us on the voices of essential workers,
(01:44):
the people who kept the city running despite the dangers.
You'll also hear directly from one of those voices, Nurse
Patricia Toiu. She kept a video journal while working inside
a New York hospital at the height of the pandemic.
That journal became part of When the City Stopped. I
have to say this was sometimes a very hard episode
to produce, so I cannot imagine what it was like
for an historian to produce an entire book reliving these moments.
(02:07):
We're going to talk about that, and we're going to
ask Robert to reflect on the importance of documenting a
crisis and why listening to each other's experiences matters. Now,
So where did this book start for you?
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It started when the pandemic began, when it became very
clear to me and a lot of other historians, folklorists,
oral historians, archivists in New York City that the pandemic
was going to be really big and we should document
it because it was going to be one of the
biggest events of our time. But in the longer run,
(02:46):
I think it started when I first heard about the
Federal Writers Project when I was in college in the
nineteen seventies and the United States was in the middle
of the Great Depression, and a project was put together
to record the history and thoughts, folklore and oral history
of Americans to help them cope with a difficult time
and maybe strengthen the bonds between them in the face
(03:09):
of great difficulties. And I always thought it'd be great
to work on something like that in the future. And
when COVID hit and we began collecting oral histories, poems, journals, photographs,
I saw that as being connected in some sense with
the work of the Federal Writers Project back in the
nineteen thirties, and carrying forward in that same spirit. The
(03:31):
Federal Writers Project was designed during the Great Depression. It
had two purposes. It was to yes boost support for
the New Deal in President Franklin Roosevelt's programs, but also
to identify sources of strength in the American people and
their past and in their present, to create common bonds
between people who are going through a huge economic crisis
(03:53):
and felt really ripped apart by it.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
So I don't know the job of the men Hattonborough Historian.
It's a pretty interesting job. I'm sure people ask you
about it all the time. What did it feel like
to know that you were the Manhattanborough Historian and be
in the middle of this major piece of history.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
When the pandemic first broke, I had retired from Rutgers
and I was just starting my service as Manhattan Borough Historian.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
And I was.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Immensely aware of how little I knew about pandemics, epidemics, viruses,
and public health and all its forms. So I first
started out by contacting some other historians I knew that
knew about the history of medicine, that knew about the
history of epidemics. When I was editing my book, my
wife said to me, does it have an impact on
you that you spent all your days in the dark
(04:41):
back room of our apartment editing interviews where it's always
the Spring of twenty twenty, and I said, yes, but
not in the way you would think. The interviews from
the Spring of twenty twenty were hard to read, but
they were all so uplifting. They were about people who
faced great danger and then persevered in spite of it.
They figured out how to stay safe, They figured out
(05:03):
how to reinvent their jobs. They reinvented their workplaces from
the bottom up to help them more effectively cope with COVID,
more effectively heal, if at all possible, the patients that
were suffering in their hospitals. I found those stories of courage,
improvisation and solidarity absolutely inspiring, and I hope people would
find that in this book.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
So tell us a little bit about how you went
about collecting the histories that were included in the book.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
I began by looking at all the work that had
been done by historians, oral historians, folklorists all around the city,
particularly oral history projects at Fordham, at Columbia, at the
Queen's Public Library at the College of Staten Island. Then
I looked at work done by folklorests at City Low
and I looked at collections that were set up by
(05:56):
Brooklyn College, and I looked at what everybody had pulled together.
I had more than a four hundred interviews, journal entries,
poems to draw from, and it was very hard. And
I started by looking at common themes in those interviews,
and I saw that they embraced coping, suffering, and working,
and there's a lot of variation within those. And then
(06:18):
I decided to make the book as coherent as possible
while still recognizing the individuality of narrators. That I would
put the essential workers at the center of the book
and surround them with folks who coped and suffered. And
I think that was a good way to recognize the
people who bore the greatest burdens, but also put them
(06:38):
in context of other folks.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
What do you think about that praise essential workers, which
became part of our lexicon. I don't know that we
said a lot before that. And do you think that
we've really come to understand and embrace what it means
to be at an essential worker.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
I think at the moment of COVID, people did they
did recognize that, in particularly among the medical workers who
everybody knew were out there facing great danger but also
helping people survive, if that was all possible. But the
terrible working conditions that essential workers had a labor under,
(07:17):
the enormous inequalities that the pandemic revealed, the inequities along
racial and ethnic lines, and in terms of who suffered and
who worked. These suggest that there were deep inequalities in
our city, and that they undermine the lives of people
who do the most important work that keeps us going
together as a city from day to day. I remember
(07:38):
an interview with a man named Gustavo Acce, and it
was conducted by Martha Guertro Badillo. She was a student
at the Columbia Journalism School at that time. She interviewed
a deliverista and the conditions he worked under were appalling.
Even on the best of days, it was awful. You
had to deal with being sideswiped by trucks cars, You
(08:01):
had to deal with riding and all sorts of terrible weather.
You had to deal with apps that exploited you economically.
You had to face the galling fact that you delivered
food for restaurants who would not let you use their
toilet if you needed to and that to me just
showed the inequalities that the city lives with on a
(08:23):
day by day basis that were made so much worse
by COVID because workers like Gustavo who went out and
delivered food to people, they helped people stay in isolation,
helped them stay safe. And every delivery you faced the
possibility that you might catch something from someone, and then
when you went home, you faced the possibility that you
(08:45):
might infect a member of your family. So there was
a double burden there. Right, there was a burden of
getting sick on the job, but that there was a
burden of getting one of your family members sick and
they might even die. And to me it was just
and the fact that he turned those terrible circumstances into
(09:05):
inspiration for organizing with other deliveriesteras to improve their working
conditions was to me one of the most impressive things
I encountered in the interviews.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
You know, I was reading some of the transcripts of
the oral histories that you have in your book, and
one person noted that during COVID, if you die, you
die alone, and you don't get to say goodbye. You
can't even see what's happening, is what she said. And
it made me think that historians are really all the
(09:42):
more important when you can't see that happening. And I
don't know that I can articulate why I feel that way,
and I'm wondering if you can, because all these things,
people were experiencing things alone, right, and we don't know
what occurred.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
One of my grad school mentors at NYU, Tom Bender,
made this point to me. He said, there were many,
many ways of experiencing COVID in New York City. Some
people were frontline workers. Some people were essential workers but
working in relative safety. Some people left the city and
went to country houses. Some people worked from the back
(10:18):
of their apartment the way I did. None of them
knew what the other was going through. It was really
impossible to grasp that. And Tom suggested, and I agreed
with him, that if New Yorkers were ever going to
come up with any kind of common response to COVID,
they need a deep appreciation of what each other was
(10:38):
going through so that they could, in the future, in
some effective sense, become their brothers and sisters keepers.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Do you feel like we have created a common response
to COVID in any way?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Not yet a common response to COVID. There's not yet
a common understanding of COVID. There was tremendous solidarity, and
I think that was really impressive, particularly in the months
before the introduction of the vaccine. Those were the days
when we didn't know how it was spread. We just
knew that it was deadly, that as many as eight
hundred people were dying every day in New York City,
(11:11):
and we had to come up with a common response
despite all that we didn't know. Once the vaccines came in,
the vaccines started to become the issue in many people's minds.
The vaccines broke the back of COVID. I don't think
there's any doubt about that, but disputes over the vaccines
went to get them, whether to get them, how to
get them, all those things started to raise questions and
(11:33):
a kind of sourness that was a marked contrast I
thought to the earlier days of the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Well, one reflection on the earlier days of the pandemic,
also from the oral histories, was they were noting that,
you know, it's amazing to me how many people are
still outside walking around even with no mask, acting like
nothing happened. And she said she just didn't understand that
acting like nothing happened. And I, you know, all these
years later, it feels in some ways like we're still
(12:01):
walking around like nothing happened, right, So is that your
take on it.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
I think for a lot of people, it was easier
to pretend that nothing was happening than it was to
face the possibilities of danger. And one of the things
that was most instructive to me was in reading interviews
with doctors, with nurses, with folks who worked on ambulances.
They knew the dangers, they knew how risky it was
(12:28):
out there. They faced it every day, and they were
angry and appalled at people who denied the risks that
were out there. I think that if we can come
together and recognize the most difficult aspects of the pandemic,
we can realize that we're stronger together than we are separately.
And we were separated from each other during the pandemic.
We were separated from each other before the pandemic by
(12:50):
the conditions of city life. But if we can start
to recognize what different people endured during the pandemic, maybe
we could come up with a better response In the
next public health emergency that better recognizes and better builds
on our common good and are common needs.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
While some of us isolated at home during COVID, others
faced the virus head on in grocery stores, on buses
and subways, and of course, in hospitals. One of the
voices featured in When the City Stopped is nurse Patricia
tu During the height of the pandemic, she recorded a
video journal documenting her experience inside a New York hospital. So,
in our own small way, we're going to try and
(13:30):
practice what Stephen is talking about and to recognize a
difficult part of the pandemic that's after the break.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Even though I understand the severity of this virus, I
underestimated the impact it would have on the American healthcare system.
Speaker 5 (13:56):
For damn sure.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
I never thought it would get to the point that
it is now, and it shouldn't have ever gone to
this point. So yeah, this is why I feel like
everyone needs to know what exactly is happening, because it's
not going to end well.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Welcome back to next city. The voice you just heard
belongs to Patricia Tough, a nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital,
one of the busiest medical centers in New York City.
On March thirtieth, twenty twenty, Patricia began recording video updates
from her basement, where she was isolating from her family.
She wanted people to understand what was really happening inside
the hospitals, what she and her colleagues were seeing, and
(14:34):
what they were up against. What follows are excerpts from
those early days. They're raw. There is some cursing because
it's emotional and at times difficult to hear. But the
journal reminds us what it was like at the height
of the crisis, and you might be surprised how much
sounds familiar. But that's been moved to the back of
your mind. Here's Patricia when the city had stopped, but
the work had only just begun.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
I know a lot of people have been asking me,
what's exactly what's going on? And I figured a lot
of people are listening, and they hear that we need
events and we need supplies and all this stuff, and that.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
People are dying.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
But I don't think most people understand to what extent
is happening because you're not allowed in the hospitals and
you just don't know. So that's understandable. I figured I
just do a quick update, and I'm a little late.
I should have done this from the beginning, but obviously
you don't think of these things when you're in a crisis.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
So obviously I'm a nurse.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
I say this because everything is going to fall into
peace when I explain what's been going on.
Speaker 5 (15:45):
There were no masks. They were taken.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
They were actually like physically taking off our supply room. Basically,
we were told not to wear masks like it was
not needed, although everybody felt uncomfortable, but it was not
needed unless the patient was like positive. So we're still
(16:07):
walking around the hospital talking to people.
Speaker 5 (16:12):
No mask, nothing.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Around three twenty two is when I officially like moved
downstairs to my basement because I realized that, you know,
many many of us live with our families and we
don't want to take anything home. So just on a
side note, that's why I'm here and I've been here
just to be safe. And as for my unit, we
(16:38):
have some critical care experience, but we also have to
move up and.
Speaker 5 (16:42):
Be full blown. I see you nurses.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Treating patients that are severely sick on vents that are
in respiratory failure.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
Basically they're paralyzed.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
They're on machines that we've never seen and that experienced
nurses in the ICU have a difficult time with these machines.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
And all these.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
Nurses were given one week basically to learn to shadow
and to become a fobolown ICU nurse. You usually need
at least very minimum six months orientation. All of us
was given one week. My hospital that I was at,
the CDC actually told them to convert like four hundred
(17:32):
or to make rather four hundred ICU.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
COVID beds, which is a lot of pressure.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
It's one thing to make beds, but it's another thing
to have the staff that could actually take care of
these patients.
Speaker 5 (17:44):
Not all nurses do the same thing.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
I'm not saying anyone is least important, but you can't
just throw a nurse in any situation and expect them
to know what to do.
Speaker 5 (17:53):
It's just not possible.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
It's like throwing a golfer to go play bass the
well in a week. They should learn and like compete
in the NBA. That's exactly what I could compare it to. Basically,
New York City has thirty seven hundred and sixty five
confirmed cases, six hundred and seventy two deaths so far,
(18:17):
we do not have anyone that has recovered. When you're
on a event as a COVID patient, your minimum is
two weeks. We've had patients on it for a month.
So the fact that you know, Cuomo has been you know,
begging for help, wedding for events, and you know.
Speaker 5 (18:36):
That's the whole.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
The whole thing with the supplies, and then the whole
thing with Trump saying basically that New York City's exaggerating
the amount of events we need. Like, I really fucking hope, So, like,
you know, I don't want to say he's wrong, because
I don't want that to be wrong, but I really,
(19:01):
you know, like I fucking hope. So because it doesn't
fucking look good, we can't get these people off. And
pretty soon what's going to happen is you were going
to have to choose who gets vented and who doesn't
get vented. And what that entails is basically who gets
(19:24):
to live and who doesn't get to live. Does your
sixty five year old grandma gets to live or your
forty year old neighbor.
Speaker 5 (19:35):
Like shit like that?
Speaker 4 (19:39):
As an American, you know, born and raised in Queens
do my part as a good citizen. I'm a good person,
you know, I would like to say so. And living
in this country, it is a fucking shame that our
(20:00):
government can't get us the supplies that we need.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
You can't say we don't have the resources.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
As for all nurses, like, I'm sure this goes for everybody.
None of us are sleeping. I don't sleep anymore, you know.
I think everybody has that high anxiety that they have
deep in them. And although I'm proud of our nurses,
(20:31):
they're functioning and they're fighting through it, and they're expressing
how they feel. That high anxiety twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
It's killer. So all my nurses, if you do not
get the proper gear, your life is not worth losing.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
No job, like you deserve to come home to a
family too.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
That was March thirtieth. This next entry is from a
few days later, April fifth, twenty twenty, as New York
City approached the peak of the crisis.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
How has this week been so? I think the last
time I spoke, I said New York City was on fire. Well,
welcome to hell, because we are basically at the gates
of Hell. We are very close from the tipping point,
reaching the peak.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
We're almost there.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
I'm wearing a bandana not to look cute, but because
of all the stress, my hair has started to fall out,
which is not the worst thing in the world.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
It's hair. I'll grow back, but it's just really annoying.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
At this point, I have accepted the fact that our government,
our president, like, no one is coming to help. So
in New York it's just us, you know, I'm not
like there's nothing we can do, no one is coming
to help us. And working in this RIKIU, this ICU,
(22:09):
it's the number one goal or the number one reason
you come into work is basically to save as many
lives as possible. So it's basically everybody's dying and you're
just you're doing your best to keep every single one
of these people alive. Every minute that I have gone
(22:30):
into work, that you are working at like one hundred
and fifty percent, you don't even have time to think
your own thoughts.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
You just have time to see what's going on and.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Go to work.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
Some of the patients and this is the first time
I've experienced it where they're completely awake and intubated and
you're restrained.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
And one experience I had was.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
This patient was awake and obviously couldn't talk, but you know,
I told her to squeeze my hand, and she squeezed
my hand. I said, do you understand me. If you
understand me, squeeze my hand twice. She squeezed my hand twice.
She knew exactly what's going on. I had to explain
to her that she's nice to you. She has a
vent in her mouth. I know she's scared, and she
(23:20):
was crying. I told her I'll be here.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
She couldn't see my face. All you see is goggles.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And a mask.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
She couldn't see my face.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
And when I tell you how fast these patients decompensate
or turn around, I walk out the room and maybe
an hour later, all of a sudden, her bible start
going crazy. Me and the resident have to gown up.
We had to go in there. And like when I
tell you, every minute we are in the hospital, we
are working to save these people's lives. And it's not exaggeration.
(23:55):
What they're asking for us to do is like beyond
God's work. I don't even know how it's gonna be possible.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
How we're gonna do this. And I'm proud of.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
All my nurses for stepping up and doing this, But
at the same time, I just I don't Sometimes I
don't know how we're gonna do this. It came to
the point where I felt like we're losing hope. But
(24:25):
the end of the day, you know, we're not giving up.
No matter what, We're going to keep fighting. It's our city.
We are in war, you know, New York is in
war when we're by ourselves, and I've accepted that. But
I'm never going to forget anything that's happened here. And
I don't think anybody who's been through this experience, not
(24:46):
just nurses, not just doctors, everybody in the grocery stores,
the male people, delivery, subway workers, cleaners, everybody is going
to remember.
Speaker 5 (24:58):
What happened.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
By the end of May, the worst of the first
wave had passed, but for frontline workers like Patricia, the
impact lingered. This next entry is from May twenty ninth
to twenty twenty, nearly two months after she started recording
her journal.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
This month is a lot better, thankfully, as you could
see my hair as finally growing back, which I wasn't
too worried about. But I found out also that many nurses.
I wasn't the only one.
Speaker 5 (25:27):
Who lost hair due to stress.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
So all my nurses or whoever central workers who was
going through the same thing.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
It will get better, you know.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
And I would love to tell all my nurses and
essential workers and anyone who's struggling, please please reach out
to anybody, whether that's seeing a counselor a friend, doing
an activity. What we through and what everybody is going
through is not easy. I don't think I've had real
(26:06):
time to actually process everything that goes on. I did
start seeing a counselor just because I understand that when
things finally calm down, I'm not talking about now, I'm
talking about later on, maybe a year from now, and
you're really able to process everything that you see. You saw,
(26:27):
you felt, the people you spoke to, the hands you held,
the last breadths that you saw.
Speaker 5 (26:36):
I don't know how I'm gonna be. I don't know
what's gonna be thinking. I don't know what's gonna go
through my head right now.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
When on a daily basis, for the most part, I
feel okay, but I do have my.
Speaker 5 (26:48):
Times where I'm very upset and I don't like nothing.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
I could have a beautiful day weather, it was amazing,
and everything was great, and suddenly I'll be really upset.
Nothing that I know or I pay attention to has
triggered that. Or i could just be sitting here just
like this and I'll just start crying and I don't
(27:16):
understand why. And I could be completely happy. I could
even be with friends and all of a sudden, something
just says like You're doesn't feel right. So for anyone
who is struggling, please I advise you, please go speak
to somebody.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
It will only help.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
What we went through is not normal, and what we're
going through is not normal, and there has to be
a healthy way to process everything. It's not gonna solve
all their problems, but.
Speaker 5 (27:52):
It'll just help you with your days go and moving
forward through your future.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Patricia Tew is one of hundreds of Essential workers whose
stories Robert Snyder included in his book After the Break.
We returned to Robert to reflect on the strength people
drew from unexpected places and what still needs to happen
in order to process what we lived through. Welcome Back.
(28:24):
The video journal we just heard is one of many
stories that Robert Snyder included in his book It's hard
to listen to, but it's also a reminder of the
strength shown by Americans doing the hardest jobs. They were
saving lives, operating beyond capacity, and holding it together when
the systems around them were stretched to the limit. And
there were many people like that. Often their strength came
(28:46):
from unexpected places. Here's Robert.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I was struck by how often people who faced great
danger in the pandemic drew on other corners of their
lives to gain strength and focus during the pandemic. I
can think of a couple interviews like that, Christopher Tedesky,
who was a doctor at New York Presbyterian, and he
drew on his experience as an outdoors person that helped
(29:16):
him deal with difficult circumstances. I was thinking about Phil Suarez,
who worked on an ambulance and drew on his experience
as a mountaineer dealing with risk. When is a risk acceptable,
when is a risk too much? He's used to doing
that in his other life. I think of Stephen Palmer,
who survived the AIDS epidemic and then went on to
(29:40):
work during COVID and use the things he learned dealing
with aids to help himself deal with COVID. So all
of us, I think, have these possibilities inside us, from
other corners of our lives that we can draw on
the next time we face an emergency.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
It was a crisis, and in a crisis, you don't
get much time for reflection. Just like moved through it.
In one of the oral histories, they said, I don't
think I've had time to actually process everything that goes on.
And all these years later, I'm not sure if we
have processed as a country or as New York what
has gone on even still, And I wonder what you
(30:17):
think needs to still happen to ensure we do process this.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I think that's a great point. I'd compare it to
nine to eleven. After nine to eleven, there was all
sorts of memorial making, There was all sorts of collective grief.
There was all sorts of efforts for people to support
each other. There were all sorts of medical and psychological
programs established for people who are close to the disaster
in some way affected by the disaster. We haven't seen
(30:42):
anything quite like those efforts in COVID, And I think
that COVID lasted longer that's part of the explanation. People
got more used to living in isolation during COVID, and
at the same time, they all looked at it really
really differently, and over time processed COVID in many different
ways and just wanted to forget it. So I think
(31:03):
that if we're going to come to grips with it
and build on it in a positive way, we have
to carefully, cautiously, humanly, generously try to understand what did
happen so that we can move forward from it. If
we don't do that, it's going to be haunting us
in ways that we don't understand that are going to
pop up in all sorts of unusual circumstances.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
You mean, like the history repeats itself sort of thing,
or it echoes.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Doesn't always repeat itself exactly, but it echoes in rhymes sometimes,
And I think that's something to be thought about. I'll
give you an example. In all the interviews that I
read that were conducted back in twenty twenty, there was
huge anger at Donald Trump for how his presidential administration
was dealing with COVID, all across the interviews, all across
(31:48):
New York City. If you had told me in twenty
twenty that in twenty twenty four you'd actually get more
votes in New York City. I would have been astonished,
But that happened. People forgot how angry they were him
in twenty twenty, and in some neighborhoods a few more
of them went out and voted for them than they
had four years earlier. I didn't expect that.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, I think a lot of people would not have
expected that and would have thought that it would have
been harder to forget so much. But the thing that
you said is haunting me right now where you said
that forgetting was actually a way of healing, And I
wonder if there's maybe hopefully a cycle on which healing
also then includes remembering. Is that how it works?
Speaker 2 (32:26):
I would hope so, I would hope.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
So.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I am not an expert on trauma. I am not
a psychologist, but I do think that if you don't
confront some of the demons in your past, you can't
overcome them. I think you have to do that at
some point, and it helps you move on free from
some of the pains of what you suffered prior.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
We hope you enjoy this episode of Next City, a
show about change, makers and their stories. Together we can
spread good ideas from one city to the next city.
Thank you for listening this week. Thank you to our
guest Robert Snyder, Manhattan Borough historian and professor emeritus of
Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark. His
book When the City Stopped is out now. Thank you
to Patricia Teu, whose pandemic journals we listen to, and
(33:22):
thank you to the hundreds of other folks who share
their stories and experiences for the book. Our audio producer
is Slavana Alcala, Our show producer is Maggie Bowles, Our
executive producer is Ryan Tillotson, and I'm Lucas Gridley, executive
director for Next City. By the way, Next City is
a news organization with a nonprofit model. If you like
what we're doing here, please consider pitching in to support
our work. Visit nextcity dot org slash membership to make
(33:44):
a donation. We'd love to hear any feedback from our listeners.
Please feel free to email us at info at nexcity
dot org and if you haven't already subscribed to the
show on Apple, Spotify, good Pods, or anywhere you listen
to your podcasts, the s
Straw hut media.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
People got more used to living in isolation during COVID,
and at the same time, they all looked at it really,
really differently, and over time processed COVID in many different
ways and just wanted to forget it. So I think
that if we're going to come to grips with it
and build on it in a positive way, we have
to carefully, cautiously, humanely, generously try to understand what did
(00:37):
happen so that we can move forward from it.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
This is Lucas Grinley from Next City to show about
change makers and their stories. Truth is, there are solutions
to the problems of pressing people in cities. If you're listening,
I hope it's because you want to spread good ideas
from one city to the next city. It's hard to
believe that it's been just over five years since the
start of the pandemic. Five years since we sanitize our groceries,
(01:00):
became zoom super users learned the difference between an N
ninety five and a surgical mask. Five years since our
daily routines were upended and for many life changed in
lasting ways. Everyone was touched by it through illness, loss, isolation,
or the disruption of what we once thought of as normal.
In today's episode, we're doing our best to contribute to
(01:22):
the collective effort that's needed to process what happened. Specifically,
we're revisiting New York City in the earliest days of
COVID nineteen with Robert Snyder. Robert is Manhattan Borough historian.
He's also a professor emeritus of Journalism and American Studies
at Rutgers University in Newark. His new book, When the
City Stopped focuses us on the voices of essential workers,
(01:44):
the people who kept the city running despite the dangers.
You'll also hear directly from one of those voices, Nurse
Patricia Toiu. She kept a video journal while working inside
a New York hospital at the height of the pandemic.
That journal became part of When the City Stopped. I
have to say this was sometimes a very hard episode
to produce, so I cannot imagine what it was like
for an historian to produce an entire book reliving these moments.
(02:07):
We're going to talk about that, and we're going to
ask Robert to reflect on the importance of documenting a
crisis and why listening to each other's experiences matters. Now,
So where did this book start for you?
Speaker 2 (02:24):
It started when the pandemic began, when it became very
clear to me and a lot of other historians, folklorists,
oral historians, archivists in New York City that the pandemic
was going to be really big and we should document
it because it was going to be one of the
biggest events of our time. But in the longer run,
(02:46):
I think it started when I first heard about the
Federal Writers Project when I was in college in the
nineteen seventies and the United States was in the middle
of the Great Depression, and a project was put together
to record the history and thoughts, folklore and oral history
of Americans to help them cope with a difficult time
and maybe strengthen the bonds between them in the face
(03:09):
of great difficulties. And I always thought it'd be great
to work on something like that in the future. And
when COVID hit and we began collecting oral histories, poems, journals, photographs,
I saw that as being connected in some sense with
the work of the Federal Writers Project back in the
nineteen thirties, and carrying forward in that same spirit. The
(03:31):
Federal Writers Project was designed during the Great Depression. It
had two purposes. It was to yes boost support for
the New Deal in President Franklin Roosevelt's programs, but also
to identify sources of strength in the American people and
their past and in their present, to create common bonds
between people who are going through a huge economic crisis
(03:53):
and felt really ripped apart by it.
Speaker 3 (03:58):
So I don't know the job of the men Hattonborough Historian.
It's a pretty interesting job. I'm sure people ask you
about it all the time. What did it feel like
to know that you were the Manhattanborough Historian and be
in the middle of this major piece of history.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
When the pandemic first broke, I had retired from Rutgers
and I was just starting my service as Manhattan Borough Historian.
Speaker 4 (04:18):
And I was.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
Immensely aware of how little I knew about pandemics, epidemics, viruses,
and public health and all its forms. So I first
started out by contacting some other historians I knew that
knew about the history of medicine, that knew about the
history of epidemics. When I was editing my book, my
wife said to me, does it have an impact on
you that you spent all your days in the dark
(04:41):
back room of our apartment editing interviews where it's always
the Spring of twenty twenty, and I said, yes, but
not in the way you would think. The interviews from
the Spring of twenty twenty were hard to read, but
they were all so uplifting. They were about people who
faced great danger and then persevered in spite of it.
They figured out how to stay safe, They figured out
(05:03):
how to reinvent their jobs. They reinvented their workplaces from
the bottom up to help them more effectively cope with COVID,
more effectively heal, if at all possible, the patients that
were suffering in their hospitals. I found those stories of courage,
improvisation and solidarity absolutely inspiring, and I hope people would
find that in this book.
Speaker 3 (05:28):
So tell us a little bit about how you went
about collecting the histories that were included in the book.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
I began by looking at all the work that had
been done by historians, oral historians, folklorists all around the city,
particularly oral history projects at Fordham, at Columbia, at the
Queen's Public Library at the College of Staten Island. Then
I looked at work done by folklorests at City Low
and I looked at collections that were set up by
(05:56):
Brooklyn College, and I looked at what everybody had pulled together.
I had more than a four hundred interviews, journal entries,
poems to draw from, and it was very hard. And
I started by looking at common themes in those interviews,
and I saw that they embraced coping, suffering, and working,
and there's a lot of variation within those. And then
(06:18):
I decided to make the book as coherent as possible
while still recognizing the individuality of narrators. That I would
put the essential workers at the center of the book
and surround them with folks who coped and suffered. And
I think that was a good way to recognize the
people who bore the greatest burdens, but also put them
(06:38):
in context of other folks.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
What do you think about that praise essential workers, which
became part of our lexicon. I don't know that we
said a lot before that. And do you think that
we've really come to understand and embrace what it means
to be at an essential worker.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
I think at the moment of COVID, people did they
did recognize that, in particularly among the medical workers who
everybody knew were out there facing great danger but also
helping people survive, if that was all possible. But the
terrible working conditions that essential workers had a labor under,
(07:17):
the enormous inequalities that the pandemic revealed, the inequities along
racial and ethnic lines, and in terms of who suffered and
who worked. These suggest that there were deep inequalities in
our city, and that they undermine the lives of people
who do the most important work that keeps us going
together as a city from day to day. I remember
(07:38):
an interview with a man named Gustavo Acce, and it
was conducted by Martha Guertro Badillo. She was a student
at the Columbia Journalism School at that time. She interviewed
a deliverista and the conditions he worked under were appalling.
Even on the best of days, it was awful. You
had to deal with being sideswiped by trucks cars, You
(08:01):
had to deal with riding and all sorts of terrible weather.
You had to deal with apps that exploited you economically.
You had to face the galling fact that you delivered
food for restaurants who would not let you use their
toilet if you needed to and that to me just
showed the inequalities that the city lives with on a
(08:23):
day by day basis that were made so much worse
by COVID because workers like Gustavo who went out and
delivered food to people, they helped people stay in isolation,
helped them stay safe. And every delivery you faced the
possibility that you might catch something from someone, and then
when you went home, you faced the possibility that you
(08:45):
might infect a member of your family. So there was
a double burden there. Right, there was a burden of
getting sick on the job, but that there was a
burden of getting one of your family members sick and
they might even die. And to me it was just
and the fact that he turned those terrible circumstances into
(09:05):
inspiration for organizing with other deliveriesteras to improve their working
conditions was to me one of the most impressive things
I encountered in the interviews.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
You know, I was reading some of the transcripts of
the oral histories that you have in your book, and
one person noted that during COVID, if you die, you
die alone, and you don't get to say goodbye. You
can't even see what's happening, is what she said. And
it made me think that historians are really all the
(09:42):
more important when you can't see that happening. And I
don't know that I can articulate why I feel that way,
and I'm wondering if you can, because all these things,
people were experiencing things alone, right, and we don't know
what occurred.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
One of my grad school mentors at NYU, Tom Bender,
made this point to me. He said, there were many,
many ways of experiencing COVID in New York City. Some
people were frontline workers. Some people were essential workers but
working in relative safety. Some people left the city and
went to country houses. Some people worked from the back
(10:18):
of their apartment the way I did. None of them
knew what the other was going through. It was really
impossible to grasp that. And Tom suggested, and I agreed
with him, that if New Yorkers were ever going to
come up with any kind of common response to COVID,
they need a deep appreciation of what each other was
(10:38):
going through so that they could, in the future, in
some effective sense, become their brothers and sisters keepers.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Do you feel like we have created a common response
to COVID in any way?
Speaker 2 (10:50):
Not yet a common response to COVID. There's not yet
a common understanding of COVID. There was tremendous solidarity, and
I think that was really impressive, particularly in the months
before the introduction of the vaccine. Those were the days
when we didn't know how it was spread. We just
knew that it was deadly, that as many as eight
hundred people were dying every day in New York City,
(11:11):
and we had to come up with a common response
despite all that we didn't know. Once the vaccines came in,
the vaccines started to become the issue in many people's minds.
The vaccines broke the back of COVID. I don't think
there's any doubt about that, but disputes over the vaccines
went to get them, whether to get them, how to
get them, all those things started to raise questions and
(11:33):
a kind of sourness that was a marked contrast I
thought to the earlier days of the pandemic.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
Well, one reflection on the earlier days of the pandemic,
also from the oral histories, was they were noting that,
you know, it's amazing to me how many people are
still outside walking around even with no mask, acting like
nothing happened. And she said she just didn't understand that
acting like nothing happened. And I, you know, all these
years later, it feels in some ways like we're still
(12:01):
walking around like nothing happened, right, So is that your
take on it.
Speaker 2 (12:07):
I think for a lot of people, it was easier
to pretend that nothing was happening than it was to
face the possibilities of danger. And one of the things
that was most instructive to me was in reading interviews
with doctors, with nurses, with folks who worked on ambulances.
They knew the dangers, they knew how risky it was
(12:28):
out there. They faced it every day, and they were
angry and appalled at people who denied the risks that
were out there. I think that if we can come
together and recognize the most difficult aspects of the pandemic,
we can realize that we're stronger together than we are separately.
And we were separated from each other during the pandemic.
We were separated from each other before the pandemic by
(12:50):
the conditions of city life. But if we can start
to recognize what different people endured during the pandemic, maybe
we could come up with a better response In the
next public health emergency that better recognizes and better builds
on our common good and are common needs.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
While some of us isolated at home during COVID, others
faced the virus head on in grocery stores, on buses
and subways, and of course, in hospitals. One of the
voices featured in When the City Stopped is nurse Patricia
tu During the height of the pandemic, she recorded a
video journal documenting her experience inside a New York hospital. So,
in our own small way, we're going to try and
(13:30):
practice what Stephen is talking about and to recognize a
difficult part of the pandemic that's after the break.
Speaker 4 (13:47):
Even though I understand the severity of this virus, I
underestimated the impact it would have on the American healthcare system.
Speaker 5 (13:56):
For damn sure.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
I never thought it would get to the point that
it is now, and it shouldn't have ever gone to
this point. So yeah, this is why I feel like
everyone needs to know what exactly is happening, because it's
not going to end well.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Welcome back to next city. The voice you just heard
belongs to Patricia Tough, a nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital,
one of the busiest medical centers in New York City.
On March thirtieth, twenty twenty, Patricia began recording video updates
from her basement, where she was isolating from her family.
She wanted people to understand what was really happening inside
the hospitals, what she and her colleagues were seeing, and
(14:34):
what they were up against. What follows are excerpts from
those early days. They're raw. There is some cursing because
it's emotional and at times difficult to hear. But the
journal reminds us what it was like at the height
of the crisis, and you might be surprised how much
sounds familiar. But that's been moved to the back of
your mind. Here's Patricia when the city had stopped, but
the work had only just begun.
Speaker 4 (15:00):
I know a lot of people have been asking me,
what's exactly what's going on? And I figured a lot
of people are listening, and they hear that we need
events and we need supplies and all this stuff, and that.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
People are dying.
Speaker 4 (15:15):
But I don't think most people understand to what extent
is happening because you're not allowed in the hospitals and
you just don't know. So that's understandable. I figured I
just do a quick update, and I'm a little late.
I should have done this from the beginning, but obviously
you don't think of these things when you're in a crisis.
Speaker 5 (15:36):
So obviously I'm a nurse.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
I say this because everything is going to fall into
peace when I explain what's been going on.
Speaker 5 (15:45):
There were no masks. They were taken.
Speaker 4 (15:47):
They were actually like physically taking off our supply room. Basically,
we were told not to wear masks like it was
not needed, although everybody felt uncomfortable, but it was not
needed unless the patient was like positive. So we're still
(16:07):
walking around the hospital talking to people.
Speaker 5 (16:12):
No mask, nothing.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
Around three twenty two is when I officially like moved
downstairs to my basement because I realized that, you know,
many many of us live with our families and we
don't want to take anything home. So just on a
side note, that's why I'm here and I've been here
just to be safe. And as for my unit, we
(16:38):
have some critical care experience, but we also have to
move up and.
Speaker 5 (16:42):
Be full blown. I see you nurses.
Speaker 4 (16:47):
Treating patients that are severely sick on vents that are
in respiratory failure.
Speaker 5 (16:54):
Basically they're paralyzed.
Speaker 4 (17:00):
They're on machines that we've never seen and that experienced
nurses in the ICU have a difficult time with these machines.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
And all these.
Speaker 4 (17:09):
Nurses were given one week basically to learn to shadow
and to become a fobolown ICU nurse. You usually need
at least very minimum six months orientation. All of us
was given one week. My hospital that I was at,
the CDC actually told them to convert like four hundred
(17:32):
or to make rather four hundred ICU.
Speaker 5 (17:33):
COVID beds, which is a lot of pressure.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
It's one thing to make beds, but it's another thing
to have the staff that could actually take care of
these patients.
Speaker 5 (17:44):
Not all nurses do the same thing.
Speaker 4 (17:46):
I'm not saying anyone is least important, but you can't
just throw a nurse in any situation and expect them
to know what to do.
Speaker 5 (17:53):
It's just not possible.
Speaker 4 (17:56):
It's like throwing a golfer to go play bass the
well in a week. They should learn and like compete
in the NBA. That's exactly what I could compare it to. Basically,
New York City has thirty seven hundred and sixty five
confirmed cases, six hundred and seventy two deaths so far,
(18:17):
we do not have anyone that has recovered. When you're
on a event as a COVID patient, your minimum is
two weeks. We've had patients on it for a month.
So the fact that you know, Cuomo has been you know,
begging for help, wedding for events, and you know.
Speaker 5 (18:36):
That's the whole.
Speaker 4 (18:40):
The whole thing with the supplies, and then the whole
thing with Trump saying basically that New York City's exaggerating
the amount of events we need. Like, I really fucking hope, So, like,
you know, I don't want to say he's wrong, because
I don't want that to be wrong, but I really,
(19:01):
you know, like I fucking hope. So because it doesn't
fucking look good, we can't get these people off. And
pretty soon what's going to happen is you were going
to have to choose who gets vented and who doesn't
get vented. And what that entails is basically who gets
(19:24):
to live and who doesn't get to live. Does your
sixty five year old grandma gets to live or your
forty year old neighbor.
Speaker 5 (19:35):
Like shit like that?
Speaker 4 (19:39):
As an American, you know, born and raised in Queens
do my part as a good citizen. I'm a good person,
you know, I would like to say so. And living
in this country, it is a fucking shame that our
(20:00):
government can't get us the supplies that we need.
Speaker 5 (20:06):
You can't say we don't have the resources.
Speaker 4 (20:10):
As for all nurses, like, I'm sure this goes for everybody.
None of us are sleeping. I don't sleep anymore, you know.
I think everybody has that high anxiety that they have
deep in them. And although I'm proud of our nurses,
(20:31):
they're functioning and they're fighting through it, and they're expressing
how they feel. That high anxiety twenty four hours a day,
seven days a week.
Speaker 5 (20:42):
It's killer. So all my nurses, if you do not
get the proper gear, your life is not worth losing.
Speaker 4 (20:52):
No job, like you deserve to come home to a
family too.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
That was March thirtieth. This next entry is from a
few days later, April fifth, twenty twenty, as New York
City approached the peak of the crisis.
Speaker 4 (21:09):
How has this week been so? I think the last
time I spoke, I said New York City was on fire. Well,
welcome to hell, because we are basically at the gates
of Hell. We are very close from the tipping point,
reaching the peak.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
We're almost there.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
I'm wearing a bandana not to look cute, but because
of all the stress, my hair has started to fall out,
which is not the worst thing in the world.
Speaker 5 (21:39):
It's hair. I'll grow back, but it's just really annoying.
Speaker 4 (21:45):
At this point, I have accepted the fact that our government,
our president, like, no one is coming to help. So
in New York it's just us, you know, I'm not
like there's nothing we can do, no one is coming
to help us. And working in this RIKIU, this ICU,
(22:09):
it's the number one goal or the number one reason
you come into work is basically to save as many
lives as possible. So it's basically everybody's dying and you're
just you're doing your best to keep every single one
of these people alive. Every minute that I have gone
(22:30):
into work, that you are working at like one hundred
and fifty percent, you don't even have time to think
your own thoughts.
Speaker 5 (22:40):
You just have time to see what's going on and.
Speaker 2 (22:46):
Go to work.
Speaker 4 (22:46):
Some of the patients and this is the first time
I've experienced it where they're completely awake and intubated and
you're restrained.
Speaker 5 (22:56):
And one experience I had was.
Speaker 4 (23:00):
This patient was awake and obviously couldn't talk, but you know,
I told her to squeeze my hand, and she squeezed
my hand. I said, do you understand me. If you
understand me, squeeze my hand twice. She squeezed my hand twice.
She knew exactly what's going on. I had to explain
to her that she's nice to you. She has a
vent in her mouth. I know she's scared, and she
(23:20):
was crying. I told her I'll be here.
Speaker 5 (23:22):
She couldn't see my face. All you see is goggles.
Speaker 4 (23:25):
And a mask.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
She couldn't see my face.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
And when I tell you how fast these patients decompensate
or turn around, I walk out the room and maybe
an hour later, all of a sudden, her bible start
going crazy. Me and the resident have to gown up.
We had to go in there. And like when I
tell you, every minute we are in the hospital, we
are working to save these people's lives. And it's not exaggeration.
(23:55):
What they're asking for us to do is like beyond
God's work. I don't even know how it's gonna be possible.
Speaker 5 (24:02):
How we're gonna do this. And I'm proud of.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
All my nurses for stepping up and doing this, But
at the same time, I just I don't Sometimes I
don't know how we're gonna do this. It came to
the point where I felt like we're losing hope. But
(24:25):
the end of the day, you know, we're not giving up.
No matter what, We're going to keep fighting. It's our city.
We are in war, you know, New York is in
war when we're by ourselves, and I've accepted that. But
I'm never going to forget anything that's happened here. And
I don't think anybody who's been through this experience, not
(24:46):
just nurses, not just doctors, everybody in the grocery stores,
the male people, delivery, subway workers, cleaners, everybody is going
to remember.
Speaker 5 (24:58):
What happened.
Speaker 3 (25:01):
By the end of May, the worst of the first
wave had passed, but for frontline workers like Patricia, the
impact lingered. This next entry is from May twenty ninth
to twenty twenty, nearly two months after she started recording
her journal.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
This month is a lot better, thankfully, as you could
see my hair as finally growing back, which I wasn't
too worried about. But I found out also that many nurses.
I wasn't the only one.
Speaker 5 (25:27):
Who lost hair due to stress.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
So all my nurses or whoever central workers who was
going through the same thing.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
It will get better, you know.
Speaker 4 (25:41):
And I would love to tell all my nurses and
essential workers and anyone who's struggling, please please reach out
to anybody, whether that's seeing a counselor a friend, doing
an activity. What we through and what everybody is going
through is not easy. I don't think I've had real
(26:06):
time to actually process everything that goes on. I did
start seeing a counselor just because I understand that when
things finally calm down, I'm not talking about now, I'm
talking about later on, maybe a year from now, and
you're really able to process everything that you see. You saw,
(26:27):
you felt, the people you spoke to, the hands you held,
the last breadths that you saw.
Speaker 5 (26:36):
I don't know how I'm gonna be. I don't know
what's gonna be thinking. I don't know what's gonna go
through my head right now.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
When on a daily basis, for the most part, I
feel okay, but I do have my.
Speaker 5 (26:48):
Times where I'm very upset and I don't like nothing.
Speaker 4 (26:54):
I could have a beautiful day weather, it was amazing,
and everything was great, and suddenly I'll be really upset.
Nothing that I know or I pay attention to has
triggered that. Or i could just be sitting here just
like this and I'll just start crying and I don't
(27:16):
understand why. And I could be completely happy. I could
even be with friends and all of a sudden, something
just says like You're doesn't feel right. So for anyone
who is struggling, please I advise you, please go speak
to somebody.
Speaker 5 (27:35):
It will only help.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
What we went through is not normal, and what we're
going through is not normal, and there has to be
a healthy way to process everything. It's not gonna solve
all their problems, but.
Speaker 5 (27:52):
It'll just help you with your days go and moving
forward through your future.
Speaker 3 (28:02):
Patricia Tew is one of hundreds of Essential workers whose
stories Robert Snyder included in his book After the Break.
We returned to Robert to reflect on the strength people
drew from unexpected places and what still needs to happen
in order to process what we lived through. Welcome Back.
(28:24):
The video journal we just heard is one of many
stories that Robert Snyder included in his book It's hard
to listen to, but it's also a reminder of the
strength shown by Americans doing the hardest jobs. They were
saving lives, operating beyond capacity, and holding it together when
the systems around them were stretched to the limit. And
there were many people like that. Often their strength came
(28:46):
from unexpected places. Here's Robert.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
I was struck by how often people who faced great
danger in the pandemic drew on other corners of their
lives to gain strength and focus during the pandemic. I
can think of a couple interviews like that, Christopher Tedesky,
who was a doctor at New York Presbyterian, and he
drew on his experience as an outdoors person that helped
(29:16):
him deal with difficult circumstances. I was thinking about Phil Suarez,
who worked on an ambulance and drew on his experience
as a mountaineer dealing with risk. When is a risk acceptable,
when is a risk too much? He's used to doing
that in his other life. I think of Stephen Palmer,
who survived the AIDS epidemic and then went on to
(29:40):
work during COVID and use the things he learned dealing
with aids to help himself deal with COVID. So all
of us, I think, have these possibilities inside us, from
other corners of our lives that we can draw on
the next time we face an emergency.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
It was a crisis, and in a crisis, you don't
get much time for reflection. Just like moved through it.
In one of the oral histories, they said, I don't
think I've had time to actually process everything that goes on.
And all these years later, I'm not sure if we
have processed as a country or as New York what
has gone on even still, And I wonder what you
(30:17):
think needs to still happen to ensure we do process this.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
I think that's a great point. I'd compare it to
nine to eleven. After nine to eleven, there was all
sorts of memorial making, There was all sorts of collective grief.
There was all sorts of efforts for people to support
each other. There were all sorts of medical and psychological
programs established for people who are close to the disaster
in some way affected by the disaster. We haven't seen
(30:42):
anything quite like those efforts in COVID, And I think
that COVID lasted longer that's part of the explanation. People
got more used to living in isolation during COVID, and
at the same time, they all looked at it really
really differently, and over time processed COVID in many different
ways and just wanted to forget it. So I think
(31:03):
that if we're going to come to grips with it
and build on it in a positive way, we have
to carefully, cautiously, humanly, generously try to understand what did
happen so that we can move forward from it. If
we don't do that, it's going to be haunting us
in ways that we don't understand that are going to
pop up in all sorts of unusual circumstances.
Speaker 3 (31:24):
You mean, like the history repeats itself sort of thing,
or it echoes.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Doesn't always repeat itself exactly, but it echoes in rhymes sometimes,
And I think that's something to be thought about. I'll
give you an example. In all the interviews that I
read that were conducted back in twenty twenty, there was
huge anger at Donald Trump for how his presidential administration
was dealing with COVID, all across the interviews, all across
(31:48):
New York City. If you had told me in twenty
twenty that in twenty twenty four you'd actually get more
votes in New York City. I would have been astonished,
But that happened. People forgot how angry they were him
in twenty twenty, and in some neighborhoods a few more
of them went out and voted for them than they
had four years earlier. I didn't expect that.
Speaker 3 (32:06):
Yeah, I think a lot of people would not have
expected that and would have thought that it would have
been harder to forget so much. But the thing that
you said is haunting me right now where you said
that forgetting was actually a way of healing, And I
wonder if there's maybe hopefully a cycle on which healing
also then includes remembering. Is that how it works?
Speaker 2 (32:26):
I would hope so, I would hope.
Speaker 4 (32:28):
So.
Speaker 2 (32:28):
I am not an expert on trauma. I am not
a psychologist, but I do think that if you don't
confront some of the demons in your past, you can't
overcome them. I think you have to do that at
some point, and it helps you move on free from
some of the pains of what you suffered prior.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
We hope you enjoy this episode of Next City, a
show about change, makers and their stories. Together we can
spread good ideas from one city to the next city.
Thank you for listening this week. Thank you to our
guest Robert Snyder, Manhattan Borough historian and professor emeritus of
Journalism and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark. His
book When the City Stopped is out now. Thank you
to Patricia Teu, whose pandemic journals we listen to, and
(33:22):
thank you to the hundreds of other folks who share
their stories and experiences for the book. Our audio producer
is Slavana Alcala, Our show producer is Maggie Bowles, Our
executive producer is Ryan Tillotson, and I'm Lucas Gridley, executive
director for Next City. By the way, Next City is
a news organization with a nonprofit model. If you like
what we're doing here, please consider pitching in to support
our work. Visit nextcity dot org slash membership to make
(33:44):
a donation. We'd love to hear any feedback from our listeners.
Please feel free to email us at info at nexcity
dot org and if you haven't already subscribed to the
show on Apple, Spotify, good Pods, or anywhere you listen
to your podcasts, the s
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