If You Think New York City is ‘Gone,’ You Came to the Wrong Place
With the closure of Broadway plays, restaurants and museums in a COVD-19 era, many wonder: Is the world-renowned New York City only worth as much as its commercial value?
Native New Yorkers grew up navigating the subway system tourists will never master, enduring educational budget cuts that transplants will never know, and waiting in eagerness for the return of one-dollar icee carts outside of school, writes Canal Street News Summer Journalism Club member Chloe Lopez-Lee. Photo by Alexandria Misch for Canal Street News
Waves of heat swelling off black tar, sticky subway cars, cherry icees from a metal cart—these are the sensory components of a classic New York City summer. However, this summer has brought new imagery—face masks, lines of people stretching as they each stand six feet apart and brazen parking in tow-away spots. Oftentimes, when I mention growing up in NYC, similar reactions take hold: disbelief, doubt—“Wait, from which borough?” followed by the assertion “I just never thought of NYC as a place where people grow up.” I understand it. At first glance, the city may seem too loud and rambunctious for a child. But I doubt tourists ever come to visit public schools.
Growing up in a place like NYC allows you a unique and at times unfiltered childhood. Public transportation signifies early independence, since us taking the subway was easier for our parents and public schools gave out free Metrocards with three priceless rides a day. After school, we didn’t go to Times Square or The Museum of Natural History (those were for forced school trips only)—we would walk and visit each other’s apartments. As kids, we lived an education of exposure; I didn’t have to formally learn that people were homeless, that racism existed or that generational wealth often facilitates success because I saw it—all the time. Initially, this raw exposure scares many suburban parents, those who tend to imagine latchkey kids high on cocaine running rampant past streets of homeless people. However, my parents were a constant presence throughout my childhood.
When you grow up in a one-bedroom (one-bathroom) apartment with two parents and a sibling, you inherently learn the value of compromise. You learn to shower in the evening so that mom can have her shower time in the morning, and to throw out empty cartons instead of leaving them in the fridge, like someone with a live-in maid or multiple refrigerators might. After my father passed away when I was eight, my mom raised me and my younger brother. I deeply believe that our small-ish apartment encouraged us to form a deeper relationship with one another. When anyone in the house was sad, we all knew. When anyone was angry, we all knew and it was our job to put together the pieces. We always had dinner together and—since my mom’s bed was in the living room—we spent a lot of time debating current events in bed. These interactions built a tight-knit relationship in which my mom, my brother and I were interlinked, our days mingled together each evening when we returned home.
Because of our close proximity, I spent my childhood experiencing my mom’s adulthood, watching her endure the loss of my father, raising two children by herself, and working full-time as a non-profit lawyer. She took me to school almost everyday until my senior year of high school and, if I was not home at 4 p.m., I better have called or sent her a text. School came before everything, and being a student in a NYC public school in a wealthy zone (that was not my home zone) lent an entirely new depth to academic opportunities. I spent five years in Legal Outreach, a free program which hammered high schoolers with competitive Constitutional law debates, grammar and writing classes on Saturdays, internships, SAT prep and college workshops over the summers. My mother also took me to nearly all of these commitments and, in our confined living space, knew how much I was studying. I was anything but a free teen club surfing in a limo. To make matters worse, my mom grew up five blocks away from our apartment on the Lower East Side, so she knew every nook and cranny of the city.
What neither of us were prepared for was how much the neighborhood would change over the next 20 years.
A Lower East Side produce vendor sets up shop in the rain across the street from the controversial Trader Joe’s -Target complex. Photo by Alexandria Misch for Canal Street News
The Lower East Side was not previously considered a “good” neighborhood. When I was a child, we only had a fluorescent Fine Fare for food shopping, where I once pulled out a box of sugar and found the remains of a squashed roach caked on top. When Fine Fare was closed, we had a dimly-lit Rite Aid and a bodega around the corner, with a small doughnut place and pizza shop a couple of blocks away; our East Broadway subway station had mildew running down the walls, a constantly broken escalator and a payphone that someone had clipped off, leaving a hairy wire exposed that I still pass on my commute home today. From all of these context clues—along with comments from brash classmates visiting my apartment for group assignments“Wait, do you live in the Projects?”—I learned that, though I did not live in such public housing, mine was still not a well-looked upon neighborhood by outsiders’ standards. But there was history here. My dad used to work at that pizza shop a couple of blocks away, and would give my mom free pizza because he liked her. We knew the original owner of the doughnut shop and he would sometimes give me a free crème brûlée doughseed. The rich history of the LES belonged to families like mine.
However, real estate in Manhattan was shrinking in the early 2000’s and within a couple of decades, neighborhoods that were not “desirable” became acceptable” through a process known as gentrification. Largely, gentrification entails replacing the less “desirable” businesses with more attractive ones for non-native New Yorkers. In my case, this looked like the bodega being renovated into a “Big Apple Market,” the opening of a Trader Joe’s-Target complex across the street and the trendy underground food symposium called Essex Market. While local businesses may seem inherently temporary, this shift in stores had an underlying cause: to encourage the influx of transplants from all over the world into newly constructed rentals—transplants who wanted Trader Joe’s, Target and other palatable, familiar chains nearby. Of course, these changes have been mirrored in other parts of Lower Manhattan such as Chinatown—where bubble tea shops and Asian fusion dessert cafes were edging out family-owned restaurants even before COVID-19—but these new shops still had to fit in amongst a sea of stubborn local businesses. Hence, growing up in NYC provided yet another personal education—this time on gentrification.
Amidst the current pandemic, the larger concept of NYC—the one locals know to be true—is better showcased by how local businesses have responded to COVID-19, even as they are being forced out due to high rents and unstable incomes. Saigon Social, a Vietnamese restaurant near my apartment, delivered free meals to essential workers. Other local restaurants, such as Golden Diner, offered free and discounted meals to the elderly. Similarly, during Hurricane Sandy, the residents in my apartment building lined up the stairs to deliver water to seniors when the electricity failed with subsequent elevator shut down. I believe these actions stem from a larger, NYC-esque sentiment that combines fierceness with kindness, independence with collaboration, and ambition with compassion. The co-existence of such seemingly opposing values makes people uncomfortable—tourists often complain that New Yorkers are “rude” or “always in a hurry” while failing to recognize the person who gave them directions in the middle of a bustling street.
To those looking in on city life from the outside, I say: It’s okay, real New Yorkers—native or not— don’t need your recognition, or your praise for how many lights this city has. Just know that while you stand enraptured by the brightness of Times Square, we know what it means to stand resilient and adaptive as a city, through the World Trade Center bombing, the September 11 terrorist attacks , Hurricane Sandy, the election of President Trump and now through the COVID-19 pandemic. We grew up navigating the subway system you will never master, enduring the budget cuts to education you will never know, and waiting in eagerness for the return of our one-dollar icee carts outside of school. We will continue to stand here, crammed in small-ish apartments, with or without your approval.
