He wanted to “capture a precarious, historic moment when New Yorkers found strength in their shared neighborhoods and one another.”

Many New Yorkers will appreciate the book for immortalizing a peculiar time when the coronavirus pandemic “opened a window through which to see New York, if only briefly, in a new light,” as Kimmelman writes in the introduction. Last month, he published The Intimate City: Walking New York, a collection of these essays. These offerings urged New Yorkers not to abandon one another or our city, to go outside with friends when we couldn’t be inside, and to peacefully visit usually miserable places such as Times Square and the Brooklyn Bridge. Six days after then-Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency, Kimmelman invited a slew of friends and colleagues to give him tours of their neighborhoods, which he proceeded to write about in a series of columns for the paper. Among the New Yorkers who picked up this walking habit during lockdown is Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic of The New York Times. What might previously have been a casual hangout felt not life-affirming but life-confirming, proof that COVID hadn’t killed either of you yet. This transformation was best experienced on a walk with a friend. Read: We’ve seen New York’s white flight before New York felt more neighborly, like a city half its size. Left behind was everyone who couldn’t afford to leave or didn’t want to. No tourists, no crowds, wealthy New Yorkers–by-convenience gone to the Hamptons or upstate. What many New Yorkers admit more gingerly is that when the pure terror began to subside in late April 2020, we ventured out and discovered that some things about the city were better. They are morally clear: Death is awful fear is awful. A famously packed city became a fraught place where it felt like getting too close to anyone might send both of you to a mass grave.ĭespite being painful, these things are simple to talk about. Anyone on the sidewalk, many of them essential workers who had no choice but to be there, moved away from other passersby in a fearful overshoot of the recommended six-foot separation. As fatal chaos unfolded in the hospitals, a gloriously noisy soundscape was replaced by terrifyingly constant sirens and the thrum of refrigerated morgue trucks. New York City in the early days of pandemic shutdowns was a horrible place to be.

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