Was empty Manhattan a state of wonder or a looters’ playground?
Walking around Manhattan starting in mid-March of 2020, one felt a sense of respectful, disbelieving wonder, the same feeling that came after 9/11: could those buildings really come down? Could Grand Central Terminal and Times Square really be empty? Two new-ish books bring us back to that time three years ago. Gregory J. Peterson’s pictorial, “New York Stilled Life: Portrait of a City in Lockdown,” and Jeremiah Moss' “Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York” are, respectively, a wordless, reflective tale and a torrent of unreflective words.
Peterson is a corporate lawyer, not a professional photographer (he took the pictures for this book with his iPhone). But like many of us, he needed something constructive to do with his lockdown days, and he understood that the most effective way to document COVID-19’s impact on New York City’s streetscape was in pictures, not in words.
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Nicole Gelinas is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor at City Journal. Follow her on Twitter here.
Photo by OlegAlbinsky/iStock