During the darkest hours of a crisis that is ongoing everywhere except the now open-for-business United States, Queen Elizabeth delivered a message of uplift. She reminded her people that “the attributes of self-discipline, of quiet good-humored resolve and of fellow-feeling still characterize this country.” In America, the only thing we can say about fellow-feelers is that we have two warring factions.

New York City, on the other hand, has always managed to pass as a diverse (if spectacularly unequal) assemblage of fellow-feelers. In challenges before this pandemic—the Great Recession, the 2003 Blackout, 9/11, broken windows policing, the squeegee years, and being told to drop dead by Washington—New York bucked itself up on chutzpah and a paradoxical DNA strand of sanguine and sangfroid. After the nation lost its innocence and New York a matching pair of monuments, our President and his matching Mayor went big on shopping and building back taller than ever to stick it to the terrorists. We would crowd into subway cars and Macy’s elevators and go to two Broadway shows a night.

The build-high mythology where every New Yorker wins with “growth” has remained the only game in town, spun during the Great Depression when the builders of monuments to accumulated wealth got government subsidies to decorate their lobbies with Art Deco hammers and anvils . . . you know, to show some love for their poorly paid laborers. What the city failed to acknowledge in 2001 was that the build-high mythology where everyone wins was already dead in 1972, when the Towers went up. Four years later, in 1976, the City University of New York—then the country’s third largest institution of higher education—was broke along with the city. New York had been a working-class city that offered its citizens free college tuition as a way to get ahead. Built up over many generations by the hard work of progressives and labor unions, the city was now unraveling. In 1976, the CUNY system began charging tuition and public services were drastically cut. Meanwhile, city government began sucking up to businesses and corporations by cutting taxes and relaxing regulations. New York became a tale of two cities—the permanently rich and the permanently poor—and the pendulum never swung back.

The events of 1975-76 were the start of Donald Trump the carpetbagger marauding across his own city. He leveraged his father’s connections and the city’s dire financial straits to get massive tax breaks for his real estate projects. This massive loss of tax revenues starved education and other basic municipal functions as Trump developed properties for the rich. This marks the start of the city’s affordable housing crisis and the manipulation of real estate as an exotic financial instrument. Glitzy commercial monuments made everyday people more bereft even before Trump Towers began assaulting the city and the Queens master builder honed his skills as an epic liar: “Electricians make a hundred and some odd dollars an hour. The concrete people just make fortunes. Laborers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”

Despite Donald Trump’s inept leadership and ruthlessness in trying to put his beautiful economy over human lives, New Yorkers wanted to believe that our fight against COVID would bring us together. America may be divided and falling apart, but our Blue State mecca still owned the myth of fearless resiliency. As the Talking Heads’ David Byrne asked in the face of a pandemic: “Are we a bucket of crabs or a community?” Good question. What was our symbol of resilience going to be now? Certainly not skyscraping monuments to commerce. At the start of New York’s lockdown in March, commercial construction work hadn’t stopped and people were asking why. Why was it assumed that putting up 50 floors of luxury apartments was an essential endeavor for mostly Hispanic workers? Bill DeBlasio, New York’s liberal mayor, had to be prodded to put a stop on this labor.

For the first couple months, many New Yorkers found some reassurance and sense of community by clicking into Governor Andrew Cuomo’s daily press briefings. I worked within his administration at the time, and I was often asked by viewers why the press seemed so confrontational and jaded. The answer is that they had already spent a decade attending these scripted Andrew Cuomo shows: the drama didn’t start with the pandemic. Rather than send out a press release describing something his office had done, Cuomo sent out a press release announcing an Andrew Cuomo “event,” often involving an unfurled U.S. flag the size of a Honda Civic.

During his COVID shows, Cuomo would click through his beloved PowerPoints, talk about his mother and daughters, and put his hand over his heart a lot. People lapped it up for a while; they liked him standing up to Trump. He rolled out things like a state-branded hand-sanitizer (ironically, right when experts realized that the virus’s transmission was airborne). His administration consulted all varieties of experts, including McKinsey, to create competent plans for mobile hospital bed locations for worst-case-scenario epi curves. He applied his Queens Tony Soprano heft to convince Upstate hospitals and medical centers to share respirators with New York City.

But after five months, the early reviews are being revised. Although the Cuomo administration followed CDC guidelines, during the critical first weeks of the pandemic’s rapid spread, it made the decision to send nursing home residents who’d been hospitalized with COVID back to the nursing homes, leading to the underreporting of nursing home deaths in the state.

It’s clear that New York City has no special edge on COVID beyond the amazing frontline healthcare professionals and the essential workers, just as it is everywhere around the globe. And we’ve benefitted from the kindness of frontline volunteers from all over the country. The fact that it’s mostly workers of color who’ve been carrying the city through the crisis is also not unique to New York. The fact that we have specialized hospitals that normally cater to the affluent has been a boon when the affluent are out of town.

Here’s the cruelest irony of the pandemic: A city with a severe housing shortage for the working poor and lots of empty luxury apartments is suddenly much emptier everywhere except where the working poor live. The acres of vacant skyscrapers in this city, both commercial and residential, seem criminal in relation to three or four generations of a Jackson Heights family—essential workers—sheltering in the same small apartment with no place to quarantine for the sick. A pandemic, like a war, is all about counting, and the elemental balance sheet pits financial leverage against financial hardship. The city’s confirmed COVID cases by Zip code is like a poverty heat map—highest counts in the densely populated immigrant neighborhoods of Queens (Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona, Jamaica, St. Albans); lowest in the Upper East Side stomping ground of Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn.

If New York is lacking an adequate symbol of its resilience, it does have a meme for its alienation: the paintings of Edward Hopper. His work has never fallen out of favor and his shows are blockbusters. But something about lockdown in March and April shed light on what has always been remote and off-putting about his canvasses.

Nineteen-thirties New York was already living with a lockdown—the economy was going nowhere. Despite the visual propaganda of the Empire State Building (b. 1931) and the Chrysler Building (b. 1930), you can see a truer depiction of Depression-era New York in Hopper’s small interiors and street window vistas. This was New York before the ubiquitous skyline, a panoply of late-Victorian buildings soon to be razed for the 1930s skyscrapers that the 1980s Trump wanted to clear away across the city.

The stars of Hopper’s sparse landscapes are these buildings 50 years out of sync with streamlined Deco—apartments of wide, screen-less windows and dark wood doors opening into connecting rooms where people lived and might actually be found. In these still rooms, his subjects are often caught out by the luminosity of day’s end, suggesting some sad, private epiphany. During lockdown, many of us felt the sense of surrender Hopper creates in these scenes, but surrender to what?

Hopper’s figures seem to be living on the margins for mysterious reasons. You always feel there’s something keeping them off the streets. We see their situations as dilemmas; their surrender is our disorientation. Aren’t they going to act? Aren’t they going to be agents of their own destiny? E.B. White could have had these images in mind when he wrote that New York “succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”

The thing about the 1930s was that there was no extension of the self into the future. There were no credit cards but also no religion of re-invention, of starting over. New York in that decade temporarily lost the effervescence and delusions of capitalism. The demarcations between the rich and everyone else were more apparent than ever. There was still the New York of those with dreams, whether the fan dancer from Ohio or the stonemason from Sicily. But the walkup New York, the Hopper New York, was where anyone who’d been bruised by the beast could get lost—lost from their own disappointments but also from a relentless capitalism that refused to fully retreat with the economy it gutted.

COVID reminding us of Hopper has reminded us of how powerless income inequality has made people everywhere in America but especially New York City. As REM advised regarding New York exits: “It’s easier to leave than to be left behind.” The pandemic leavers must have some interesting stories wherever they went, but for those of us who stayed, the story is that we are still alone together. Like crabs in a bucket, we are alone together in a city where the flow of capital into reservoirs of wealth is imperative to the city’s very existence, even if the flow never comes anywhere near the majority of those who bang our pots every night to tell the world we live here. §