Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

In 2017, I did a PhotoEssay commemorating the 10th anniversary of my cancer treatment. This year, I’ve decided to do another one, taking a look at this extraordinary April in New York…

There’s “Autumn in New York” and “April in Paris,” but no songwriter has yet written “April in New York.” This April may or may not inspire such a song, but one thing’s for sure- April, 2020 will long be remembered by everyone who’s lived through it- in NYC, and everywhere else.

Here, in one of the current centers of the pandemic, with New York City, alone, accounting for 129,788 cases and 13,240 confirmed or probable deaths from the coronavirus¹ as I write this, people have been mostly hunkered down and staying inside. Last week, however, for a reason I can’t quite explain, I felt compelled to walk over to Times Square. I got there after 11pm, normally a time when activity is high in the days before the pandemic. I’m not sure what I was expecting to find. It’s not a place I have any reason or desire to go to. Most New Yorkers I know say pretty much the same thing. When I turned the corner of 8th Avenue onto 42nd Street, a corner once known as “the crossroads of the world,” I was taken by what I saw. Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been- it was pretty much what I’d been seeing on the mile walk there. The streets were deserted. Nothing was open. There were too few cars or trucks to qualify as“traffic” along ever-busy 8th Avenue that I should have been prepared for a similar sight on 42nd Street, but I wasn’t. What I saw was actually hard to believe.

It was completely deserted. The only sign of life was a police car’s revolving lights on top parked out front of the McDonald’s near 7th, which might have been open for takeout. If so, it was the only even partially open business I saw in Times Square. Or, maybe something had happened warranting a police visit. From the other side of the street, I couldn’t tell, and I wasn’t about to get curious. I turned the corner and walked up 7th Avenue to 44th Street, stopped on the corner and looked around. I was completely and utterly alone.

A song started playing softly in my brain…

“Hello darkness, my old friend.
I’ve come to talk with you, again.”*

Alone in Times Square. 7th Avenue at West 44th Street, 11:24pm, April 8, 2020. Click any picture in this Post for full size.

There was another NYPD car across the street with its lights on. I don’t know if anyone was inside it, or not. That was the only sign of “life” I could see anywhere around me. I can’t remember ever seeing it this deserted before. Ever. In my entire lifetime, I’ve never experienced a feeling quite like it.

“In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence”*

I spent some of my formative days on “the deuce” as West 42nd Street was called back when it was as it appears in the film Taxi Driver. It was raw, seedy, nasty and dangerous, but it never closed. Ever. It was, literally, the same 24 hours a day, everyday. Of course, those days are long gone. I’ve never “gotten” what 42nd Street is supposed to be now, beyond a pseudo theme park for tourists. Ditto Times Square around the corner. No wonder New Yorkers never go there. Of course, they go to the shows on the side streets, and there are some good restaurants on those as well, too, but Times Square is one gigantic wasteland as far as I’m concerned. The “redesign” is a disaster. Personally, I can’t imagine why anyone would come to New York City and go to Times Square. Even just to see it.

On this night. No one (else) did.

Harry Belafonte alone in Times Square in The World, The Flesh and The Devil, 1959. In 1981, I would see The Clash perform six times at Bond Casino, seen here when it was Bond Clothing, on the right.

In The World, The Flesh and The Devil, Harry Belafonte plays a miner trapped in a cave-in who resurfaces only to discover mankind has been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust. He sets out to look for other survivors. Bizarrely enough, this film, with the scene above, was on the night after I was in Times Square equally alone. The difference being I KNOW there are millions of other people still here. They are all hunkered down, like I am 23 hours a day, trying to survive the coronavirus pandemic.

I haven’t been able to get the feeling out of my mind since. It’s also stuck with me for other reasons I’m still trying to fully understand.

A few days later, I walked over to Grand Central Terminal, getting there at about the same time I got to Times Square, just before 11:30pm on a weeknight. A time when it’s generally pretty busy. On the way (about a mile), I counted about 10 people- on either side of the street. I entered through the Vanderbilt Avenue corner, not sure it would be open, when I came out of the underpass into the world famous main terminal, the feeling was very much the same as it was in Times Square, with a difference.

Grand Central Terminal, April 14, 2020, 11:34pm.

Standing there, alone again, reminded me that we are all on our own in a crisis. Only those working hard to keep the essentials of life going- doctors, nurses, power station workers, truck drivers, food store employees, essential business employees, pharmacy workers, postal, delivery and transit workers are keeping us from being in a very, very bad situation, particularly for as long as this is likely to wind up being. Standing there at that moment in Grand Central, I was also struck by something else. A train station is a place about travel, about going somewhere or arriving here form somewhere else. That feeling is completely alien to me. I have nowhere else to go. I realized then that the thought of leaving has never entered my mind. But for some reason, standing there, I didn’t feel hopeless, I just felt like I always do, with cancer, Sandy or 9/11- I have to find a way through it by myself.

Cary Grant, left of center, in Grand Central Terminal, in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, 1959, shows the space as it more normally is during the morning/evening rush.

Last week, a reader asked me if I’d ever been through something like this before. I had to give a qualified “Yes.” The 2012 Hurricane Sandy blackout- when we had none of those things I just listed that we have, thankfully, now, for between 5 and 12 days depending on where you were. No power, no mass transit. Not one thing was open because of a lack of electricity, and at night, the temperature went down to about 32. I spent days hunkered down in my bed fully dressed under every blanket I could muster as everything in my refrigerator and freezer went bad and I had to go about a mile to charge my phone. Of course, MANY other people had things much worse from Hurricane Sandy than I did. Many, many people lost everything. An apartment building 4 blocks from me, that I had been in the day before the hurricane, collapsed. It has still not been rebuilt. The risen tide from the Hudson River came to within one block of my apartment building, flooding many of the ground floor galleries in West Chelsea, while devastating lives all around the area. I was lucky. Still, I learned a lot from going through that, a 2 day blackout in the 90’s and of course, going through 9/11. Then, there was the Chelsea bombing in 2016 that was too close for comfort…

Close to the same scene just shown, minus Cary and everyone else. Grand Central Terminal, April 14, 2020, 11:36pm.

Standing there at that moment in Grand Central, I was also struck by something else. A train station is a place about travel, about going somewhere or arriving here from somewhere else. That feeling is completely alien to me. I never leave NYC. As with the other crisis I’ve lived through here, I, like everyone else, just finds a way. 

When I think about rising above it and transcendental places in NYC, the first place that comes to my mind is, in my opinion, what may well be the greatest feat of building by modern man in the world, Brooklyn Bridge. Before you say, “You’re nuts,” watch Ken Burns’ Documentary film on the making of Brooklyn Bridge, then see what you think. On April 16th, I decided to go there and see how The Bridge was faring during the pandemic.

Just after sunset on Brooklyn Bridge, facing Brooklyn, 7:53pm, April 16, 2020. If I could save one modern structure for eternity it would be Brooklyn Bridge. It is one of the supreme achievements of mankind, both Artistically and as a testament to the human spirit. In this case the spirit of those who designed it and built it while overcoming impossible odds.

I walked the entire span, beginning on the Brooklyn side, and arriving on the Manhattan side just after sunset. It was emptier than I could imagine it during daytime hours. As anyone who has had the joy of walking The Bridge knows, when you reach the center you are, magically, all of a sudden on top. The cabling has ended, the sides and even the railings seem to melt away and you feel like you are standing on top of the world. Now, imagine doing this in 1883 when The Bridge opened. At that point, you REALLY WERE on top of the world! This was decades before the advent of the skyscraper. Standing there, you were higher than anything you could see- anywhere around you. It truly must have felt like going to outer space. Of course, I paused and spent a good 30 minutes pondering everything that had been going on as I stood there, alone.

Alone in the middle of Brooklyn Bridge, with Manhattan to the left, Brooklyn to the right, and the East River straight ahead, 7:11pm, April 16, 2020.

“Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sounds of silence.”*

Thinking about things I’ve lived through in NYC, of course, 9/11 was the first major crisis I would point to. That morning, as I walked to work with one Tower on fire, the second about to be hit, a neighbor standing on the corner told me the first plane had flown down 7th Avenue- it had flown down my block! To this day, no one I know died in the horror that ensued. Both people I knew at the time got out. Still, the mysteries of the brain being what they are, somehow my sleeping mind connected that American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center with the heroic United Flight 93. In my dream (actually, a recurring nightmare), it was the passengers and crew of American Flight 11 that fought back and jumped the hijackers, causing Flight 11 to crash early- into my apartment building. 

18 years later, those thoughts were not in my mind when I decided to visit the Oculus in Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center Path Station Terminal at the site of the World Trade Center Towers. What is always on my mind when I visit the site of the World Trade Center is my own past. I grew up in the area. My dad had an office 2 blocks from the WTC for 45 years. I remember walking past the Towers while they were being built. Years later, the company I worked for had two Holiday Parties at Windows On The World Restaurant at the top of the South Tower, a few hundred feet from where the Oculus now is, including one for Holiday, 2000, the last Holiday season that would ever be celebrated there. Walking through the area my thoughts were on change. As in HOW MUCH change has gone on Downtown just in my lifetime

Crossing Church Street, I walked up to the front doors, half expecting to find them locked. The door opened, and there was a man standing along the wall, just inside the door. He was one of about 7 or 8 people I saw while I was inside who just stood in a spot. And stood in that spot throughout. Homeless, I guess. Most had some sort of baggage with them. There were 3 police officers walking around, who checked in on them to make sure they weren’t sleeping, among their other duties. But there was almost no one else there. I moved to the edge overlooking the 57,000 square foot floor. All the surrounding stores were closed. Off in the far distance, at the other end, the PATH train station was still in operation. Once in a while, someone walked from my end across the floor to take a PATH train uptown or to New Jersey. Mostly, I was utterly alone, once more. Again, I stood transfixed by the scene.

The 57,000 square foot main floor of Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus on April 15, 2020 at 11:56pm.

Speaking of change, I wrote about being at the Oculus in August, 2016 as it opened. That day, the floor looked like this-

Standing in the same spot I stood in taking the prior picture, on August 17, 2016 at 3pm.

Here, in this gleaming, barely 4 year old facility, was a shocking look at our present in a nutshell. The brick and mortar economy, represented by the stores that surround both levels of the Oculus, with more elsewhere in the 800,000 square foot complex, has completely paused, save for food stores, pharmacies, and home supply stores. The world has almost completely come to a stop. In fact, I think this period of time when we’ve all been home will be eventually seen as a pause between life as it was and life the way it will be. I think most of us know right now that once activity start up again, things will be different. Many of us have been, at least, subtly changed by this experience. Exactly how things will be different remains to be seen, but they will be different. Beyond the horror of all the illnesses and deaths, we will always look back at this moment “between” the old and the new as “the pause” between them.

Right now, the focus is on finding those infected, treating those ill, and keeping the virus from spreading. Eventually, we all hope, this crisis will mitigate. And then what? A lot of people (even those who haven’t gotten sick) are seriously hurting. Many have lost their jobs- temporarily, or permanently. There’s going to be a gigantic, collective, “starting over” for countless people. The ways people interact or get together and many other aspects of life not known right now will also be different. The way many businesses do business will be changed. A few/some/many small businesses, who knows how many, won’t reopen. More business will be done online.

What does this all mean?

“And the sign said:
The words of the prophets are
Written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence.””

7th Avenue at West 20th Street, April 17, 2020, 8:29pm. On this very corner, Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road ends. He wrote it 3 blocks west.

We won’t know specifically how life will be different until this is over. And no one knows when that will be right now. In the midst of all this silence, something else that can’t be heard is happening.

Change.

While we are all alone together inside, hopefully staying safe, the world is changing. The only choice we have is to adapt to it.

*- Soundtrack for this Post is “The Sound of Silence” by Paul Simon and performed by Simon & Garfunkel on the album Wednesday Morning, 3AM, 1964, and with overdubs on Sounds of Silence, released in 1966. They perform it on September 19, 1981 in Central Park below. As I write this, almost 53 million people have watched it-

This Post is dedicated to all those keeping us going, particularly in my case, my thanks to the staffs of Trader Joe’s, and Gristede’s, Chelsea, NYC, Rite-Aid, Home Depot, Con Ed, the USPS, to the truck drivers and delivery people who keep this island supplied, and to Drs. Ro & Hoffman.

NighthawkNYC.com has been entirely self-funded and ad-free for over 6 years, during which over 250 full length pieces have been published. If you’ve found it worthwhile, you can donate to keep it going & ad-free below. Thank you!

Written & photographed by Kenn Sava for nighthawknyc.com unless otherwise credited.
To send comments, thoughts, feedback or propositions click here.
Click the white box on the upper right for the archives or to search them.
For “short takes” and additional pictures, follow @nighthawk_nyc on Instagram.

Subscribe to be notified of new Posts below. Your information will be used for no other purpose.