My trip to NYC wasn’t a conventional tourist experience by any stretch of the imagination– I mostly visited places that were familiar to me because I lived there or worked there at some point, and the entire focus was on reconnecting with people I hadn’t seen in years, showing a preview of “Out of Lockstep” at an underground pop-up speakeasy, and in a way getting past the lingering anxiety I felt towards the city after 2020.
The first full day I was there, I had some time to myself since I arrived a bit early for Thanksgiving. So I visited my old neighborhoods: Bushwick, The Lower East Side, and Prospect Lefferts Gardens. The LES was difficult to photograph due to how early it gets dark at this time of year (roughly 4pm) and how densely packed everything is.
Prospect Lefferts Gardens (or PLG) was the last place I lived in the city, aside from the month and a half I spent living in a place in Midtown where I ended up breaking the lease once I saw the news about when Broadway would be reopening (it was June 2020, and they said they’d reopen in January 2021 at the earliest). PLG was the last place where I lived normal or “Before Times” NYC life, in other words. This gave it a certain sentimentality and importance to go back and just walk the same path I used to walk to and from work every day during a time that I thought would last forever. Some parts were exactly what I remembered, while others showed the impact of the shut downs years later.
This is the street that leads to the subway station I used and to Prospect Park further down (it’s gorgeous there, and I highly recommend it even to people who aren’t familiar with the city, even though it’s a bit out of the way). The restaurant, Taqueria el Patron, was one of my favorite spots, and I was a regular there with my boyfriend at the time. They have an extensive menu classic, authentic Mexican food and a variety of margaritas. On Cinco de Mayo, it’s almost impossible to get a spot there! The decor is really fun and eclectic inside. There’s a whole row of restaurants along that street, since it gets foot traffic from the park and subway station being right there.
Every day, I’d walk by the same places on my walks to and from the station, and it was always similar in the evening, with people out and about at various establishments. Some places, like Erv’s on Beekman place, served multiple functions. Erv’s was a coffee shop, a pop-up restaurant space for various chefs, a co-working space and living room for people like me who didn’t have a living room in their apartment, a place with entertainment for babies and toddlers in the neighborhood, a dog-friendly establishment, and also a late-night bar with a rotating menu of artisanal cocktails. PLG balanced big city sophistication with small town friendliness.
PLG was predictable and home-y, a part of the city that felt stable even if that’s not normally how people think of NYC. Then one day, something looked very different: there were only half as many tables and chairs in the windows of the restaurants. Then there were no tables or chairs at all, and then no one walking around any more.
In June 2020, the restaurants could open again, but only with outdoor seating. Most places at that point stuck some chairs and tables on the sidewalk or maybe even in the road, and people made sarcastic jokes about “drinking wine in the bike lane.” This worked to get business going again a bit until it got cold and the customers no longer felt comfortable sitting outside.
But it was still 2020, which meant that simply re-opening the normal indoor dining areas was out of the question.
So dining establishments brought the indoors outside by constructing little makeshift shacks outside their buildings, like the ones in these photos, and heating those. The inside wasn’t safe but the outside was too cold, so they brought the inside to the outside. It’s one of those things that gets funnier over time in retrospect.
To this day, some places still have the “outdoor” seating structures and/or truly outdoor dining that was added in 2020. The outdoor seating proved popular for the ambiance and overall vibe in the warmer months, so there was no reason to get rid of it!
This used to be my favorite bodega, and it was 24/7. Not sure what happened to it.
On the left of this photo is my old apartment building, and on the right is the former location of Erv’s, which is now a bar called Pomo. I’m sure it has a similar rotating menu of cocktails when it’s open, but unlike Erv’s, it’s apparently not a coffee shop during the day. I’m not sure what people in that building do if they need extra space now!
My old street had a dead end because of where the train tracks were positioned, but they made the area in front of the tracks look pretty cool.
My old building has architecture that reminds me of a Medieval cathedral or something. It’s about 100 years old, which makes it one of those enviable “pre-war” buildings that has good quality building materials and rent control.
The last photos of me in the 2010s was taken in the lobby of this building:
The fashions say 1910s instead of 2010s, but there are reasons for this that make sense in context. Very often when I made my own clothes, I would intentionally choose styles from “the Short 20th Century” (1910s-1980s) because I considered that era “recent enough to not be a costume, long ago enough to not go out of style again.” The idea was sustainability– hand-made clothes are very expensive and time-consuming, so I didn’t want to waste time or resources on anything that would be a short-term trend.
I also discovered that patterns from the 1910s took the least amount of alteration to fit properly on me and look flattering.
NYC fashion during the 2010s was so flamboyant, eccentric, and “anything goes” that passing 1910s fashions off as contemporary formal wear completely made sense. This was one of my go-to outfits, and I wore it all the time in various forms! The underdress also worked as an evening dress, and the overdress could be layered over other dresses or slips for a less formal look.
I can remember moving into this apartment building, but I can’t remember moving out. Obviously, I did move out at some point since all the stuff I had there is in my current apartment; I just have absolutely zero memories of it happening. It’s like I was in a trance the entire time it was happening.
And yet when I talked about these experiences at Jeffrey Tucker’s salon this past summer at PorcFest, he complimented me on having an amazingly detailed, precise memory that most people didn’t have. His jaw sort of dropped at how much I could remember about New York during that time. If I have that clear of a memory compared to most people and still have major holes in it like when I moved out, there must be a massive amount of memory loss in most of the population.
I remember filming this video in that apartment, though:
The video is age-restricted due to faux nudity. Hayden is actually wearing a swimsuit in that scene, but the camera angles and his pose hide that part… not sure why we thought that was a good idea… he did a “Florida Man” schtick in one part because his family actually had been asking him to move down to Florida, and the faux nudity looked really unhinged and crazy– it suited the “Florida Man” vibe. The entire video is a string of references to memes we were laughing at during the first months of “quarantine,” which would later be referred to as “lockdown.”
It also captures how little space we had, and how stressful the supply chain problems were early on for people in densely populated areas. There was no living room in that apartment, which is why the video starts with Hayden eating chips and playing video games in bed instead of on the couch.
About 100 days passed between when Broadway closed and when we had to move out because the roommate I was subletting from lost his job. For 100 days, we left only to walk around the park, maybe get takeout, and mail home-sewn masks to relatives.
PLG was the part of the city where I felt I had the most unfinished business when I went back. I felt like I had to see it just to know it was relatively normal and OK now.
I went to Taqueria el Patron and told the waiter, “I used to live in this neighborhood, and I was a regular here but I had to leave in May 2020. It’s my first time back since then!”
It’s hard to explain the response he had, but it was an expression I saw several times during my trip. It’s almost an expression that says someone has been dissociating for a long time, and now they can finally process what happened. It’s an expression that looks like they’ve seen a ghost but made peace with it being there.
I walked around PLG thinking my time living there was cut short in an artificial way, and in a different timeline, I still live on Beekman Place next to Erv’s and go to Karaoke nights at the Way Station, and at this time of year I’m working a side gig as one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s and in my spare time I’m getting ready for Anti-con…
My feelings of being in the wrong timeline were not unique to me, either…
(In part 2, I’ll talk about what my friends who stayed had to say about the city now).