Anjali Kumar was in New York on September 11, 2001. The adviser to tech start-ups and her husband, a doctor, lived right next to the World Trade Center on Worth Street. “We, unfortunately, saw the whole thing,” Kumar said when I spoke to her earlier this spring. Kumar and her husband evacuated and walked uptown, where he went to work at a hospital. She didn’t hear from him for two days.
“I’ve lived through 9/11, lived through Hurricane Sandy, went through all these major events and I have always been in New York,” said Kumar. “It’s very much my home. It never occurred to me to leave before.”
Before, she means, New York became the epicenter of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In March, as the city began to shut down and her husband headed to the front lines, Kumar and her daughter decamped to the “modest little country cabin” the family bought eight years ago in upstate New York. She thought they’d be gone for two weeks; that was almost three months ago.
“I do feel that, kind of, New York guilt,” said Kumar, author of Stalking God: My Unorthodox Search for Something to Believe In. “I’m obviously so grateful to have this home and to be in a safe place”—particularly to limit exposure to her husband, who is treating infected patients. But she knows that the families of many other essential workers aren’t as lucky. As a civic-minded 20-year New Yorker who has worked at Robin Hood Foundation and feels deeply connected to her neighbors, Kumar added: “It’s a weird thing to be told that the best way you can do that is to not be there or to stay home.”
An estimated 420,000 residents, according to the New York Times, fled as COVID-19 brought New York to its knees, turning one of the brightest, most vibrant cities in the world into a shell of its former self. According to data, the majority of people left from some of the city’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods: the Upper East Side and West Village, SoHo and Brooklyn Heights, which saw their populations decrease by 40% or more. “I knew that I was joining an exodus of the privileged,” wrote journalist George Blecher in a recent New York Times op-ed entitled, “I Left My Troubled City Behind. Now I Feel Guilty.”
The richest New Yorkers had the luxury of leaving, and, in the starkest sense, the luxury of living: the poorest boroughs and neighborhoods where the fewest number of people fled (The Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn’s East New York) also experienced the highest death rates from the novel coronavirus, which hit African American and Latino communities at disproportionately higher rates. Hardly a “great equalizer,” the pandemic laid bare the city’s stark racial inequities; still mourning the loss of Black lives from the coronavirus, thousands of protesters streamed into the streets in late May and early June to march against more Black lives lost to police brutality, after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.
COVID-19 also magnified New York’s already-gaping wealth gap. As more than a million New Yorkers plunged into unemployment, and Governor Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order halting evictions, a select few clamored to pay double rent, getting into heated bidding wars over Hamptons rentals going for triple or quadruple normal market price—in some cases upwards of $15,000 per month—for a bucolic refuge.
“I’ve never seen people want to get out in such a quick time,” Jordan Daniel, a real estate agent at Douglas Elliman in the Hamptons, said. From the start of the pandemic in March, Daniel said he received more inquiries than ever in his career as a broker. “They just said, ‘I don’t care what it is, I just want to be out there to have space for my kid. I cannot have them stuck in an apartment all day,” said Daniel. “They wanted to stay as long as they could.”
But leaving the city in its darkest hour struck some who remained as akin to abandoning a family member or betraying a friend—“cheating on New York with the Hamptons,” as writer-comedian Jill Kargman has said.
“It does feel traitorous to not be there with this mass group, to not be there when needed,” said Judy Vale, a mother of one in Brooklyn who left the city first for her parents’ vacant home in Rhode Island, and then to her in-laws’ in New Jersey, where there’s the benefit of childcare. “There is privilege guilt, for sure.”
New Yorkers who dispersed to greener pastures also felt the stigma that, in leaving the epicenter of the virus, they could potentially spread it across the country. Something Navy influencer Arielle Charnas got a torrent of negative comments (and, she says, death threats) when she headed to a Hamptons rental home two weeks after posting that she tested positive for COVID-19. (“They were the exact opposite of the people that we wanted to come out,” said Daniel.) A couple of times, when a few Rhode Islanders spied the New York plates on Vale’s car, she said they shouted, “Go home!”
Some of those who skipped town seem acutely aware of potential judgment or shaming. “I definitely feel like if I’m talking to people who are still in New York, that the beginning of your sentence has to be like, ‘I know I’m really lucky that I have the option to do this,’” Vale said. “You feel like you can’t complain…even though I legitimately miss my home and want to go back as soon as I can.” Many potential subjects I reached out to interview declined, not wanting to attach their names to what they perceived as a prickly subject, some worrying they’d jeopardize their professional brands or New York–based companies by advertising, on the record, that they’d fled.
That tension between the two camps (those who left and they who remained) bubbled up, as ever, online. “After the pandemic is over I will absolutely judge you on whether you stayed in the city or left,” tweeted New York Times reporter Sandra Garcia, sharing the data on the disparate racial and socioeconomic impact of the coronavirus. “I grew up in NJ, so I’ve always been wary of calling myself a New Yorker. It felt like faking bc I wasn’t raised here,” tweeted Charlotte Alter, Time correspondent and author of The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, at the end of March. “But now I’m sticking it out in this city while lots of born-and-raised ‘New Yorkers’ are fleeing. To them I say: I’m a fuckin New Yorker, who the hell are you?”
“I think people who’ve stayed in the city, in general, are kind of irritated that so many people left and especially that so many people left after they were asked to stay for public health reasons,” Amanda Mull, a staff writer covering the pandemic at The Atlantic, told V.F. “People who are around to enjoy the city when it’s $17 cocktails and fancy restaurants…and then once it’s time to band together and help their neighbors and care about the people around them, they just decided that was not for them.”
Living in the desolate, nearly dystopian city during the pandemic, hearing the sirens wailing at all hours and cheering out the window for essential workers every night at 7 p.m. has become a badge of honor, making transplants feel like they’ve earned their New York bona fides once and for all. The pandemic “is when I’ve finally been able to feel like I am this city and this city is me,” wrote Erika Soto Lamb, vice president of social impact strategy at Comedy Central and a Texas native, in a “quarantine love letter” at Medium. “Like Governor Cuomo said recently, we’ve been through hell together.”
By some metrics, spending 7 or 10 consecutive years here gives someone the right to anoint themself a New Yorker. But after eight years and one global pandemic, Alter made it official with a mock-naturalization ceremony officiated by her husband, Newsday columnist (and lifelong Brooklynite) Mark Chiusano, who wrote about the ritual with the headline, “New Yorkers Through and Through.” He wore a Mets jersey while Alter read aloud the E.B. White quote about the three New Yorkers (commuters, natives, and newcomers), ate pizza, and watched Moonstruck.
Formalizing her New Yorker status “reminded me a little bit of when we got married,” Alter said. “We had been together for so long, but there is a difference, like a ‘through-thick-and- thin’-type commitment.”
There is the matter of leaving or staying, but also how one presents it on social media. Mull touched a nerve in April when she tweeted: “The people who fled new york and were trying to keep it a secret from online are starting to crack from their inability to post.” After going dark for the first month or so of isolation, Mull observed some people surfacing in decidedly not-urban backgrounds on Instagram. They were sharing sprawling green lawns (the new, fraught mid-pandemic status symbol) and, as temperatures rose, pools with the tone-deaf #quarantan. It all seemed terribly idyllic and picturesque at a time when the city’s daily death toll was nearing 800 people per day. The total number of deaths from coronavirus in the city is now estimated at more than 17,000, or the equivalent of about five 9/11s.
“Based on the fact that a lot of them were hiding what they had chosen, they appeared to understand that choice was not the most responsible one they could have made,” said Mull.
But some New Yorkers who left the city responsibly bristle at the criticism. “I don’t begrudge feeling a little bit like you’ve earned some sort of Girl Scout or a Boy Scout badge because you’ve been through something,” said one New Yorker quarantining at a second home outside New York, who requested anonymity. But she also rolls her eyes at what she sees as performative, holier-than-thou social posts about staying in the city, pointing out that those hunkering down in multimillion-dollar apartments on the Upper East Side are just as disconnected from the front lines as the elite sweating it out in the suburbs.
“I’m not going to put my family’s health at risk when I have the option not to, just to look good to strangers on social media,” she said. “If you want to win the true New Yorker contest, go for it. You win.”
She said it pains her to not be able to invite family and friends to stay at her home; she has continued to pay her nanny and weekly housekeeper during the pandemic and has made charitable relief donations, and is careful not to overdo it with posts about how much she misses the city (“it feels a bit disingenuous. Like, ‘Well, all right, you miss it so bad? Come on back.’”) But the fact that the privileged were better positioned to skirt the worst of the coronavirus hardly shocked her: “If seeing your friends in beach houses and country homes is the thing that is enlightening you to the huge wealth gap in New York City, then, like, what the fuck have you been paying attention to for the past two decades?”
To Kumar, squabbling over who is the most true-blue New Yorker is a losing game. “It’s such a New York–centric view that New Yorkers are like, ‘Well, this is only happening in New York,’ when we know it’s a global pandemic,” she said. “It’s not a competition of where does it suck most? This is not a competition anyone wants to win.” From her second home upstate, Kumar has been leveraging her tech connections to work on PPE donations and funneling donated tablets to ICUs so people can connect with loved ones before they pass.
“Are people going to judge me by the totality of what I did during the pandemic,” Kumar asked. “or just that I jumped in my car and drove upstate?”
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