After the long, bumpy pandemic, 2022 was the year New York City came back to itself – to the essence, the truths. Things weren’t exactly as they had been, but most of all they were recognizable. The subways were packed; lines for Instagrammable breakfast pastries were long; parties were busy and you didn’t have to email a negative Covid result to your host when you responded. The romance of eating outside in the cold, wrapped in North Face and plaid blankets, was over. After all, New Yorkers are like people indoors. Remarkably, art, commerce, popular culture and civic spirit seemed to work together to provide the best – or most honest – portrayals of the city’s character: from all generosity, self-sacrifice and beauty to excess and animosity. An incomplete accounting:
The most beautiful municipal job description ever
It was the list of vacancies that, if you’re being honest with yourself, made you think twice about what you were doing with your life: the city was looking for a rat tsar, or more formally a “rodent control director”; the ideal candidate would be someone who is “highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty”. The war on vermin got serious. “Despite their successful public engagement strategy and brutal social media presence,” the post stated, “rats are not our friends” and “must be vanquished.” At an October press conference announcing new waste disposal rules, the city’s sanitation commissioner issued a viral rallying cry: “Rats don’t run this city, we do.” It clearly appealed to people – the city soon removed the job posting from its website when the system was flooded with applicants.
The maligned tourist selfie returns
The pandemic forced the popular pastime of complaining about tourists into submission, first because there were no tourists to complain about and later because bureaucrats reminded us again and again that their return was vital to the city’s economic recovery. This year they came back in droves, many landing in one of the world’s most sought-after selfie spots: a stretch of Washington Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn, where you can get a great shot of the Manhattan Bridge framing the Empire State Building. People in the neighborhood, many of whom now spend more time working from home, soon grew sick of the cameras, the crowds, and most importantly, the narcissism that turned travel into an exercise in self-obsession – making it possible to object to city dwellers, from the top of millions of lofts, without appearing condescending.
The moody mythologies of Edward Hopper
In addition to reviving the thrill of museum-going as the challenges of the pandemic eased, “Edward Hopper’s New York” at the Whitney reminds us of the seductive power of the city’s peculiar, contrarian landscape. Hopper preferred bridges, tenements, rooftops, and water towers in his paintings to the skyscrapers rising around him—after all, he was the original nostalgist.
The TV show that hit the nail on the head on the dysfunctional uptown marriage
“Fleishman Is in Trouble,” the miniseries The Times writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner adapted from her bestselling novel of the same name, brought realism back to the depiction of derailed relationships typical of Manhattan’s haute bourgeoisie. Early in the pandemic, HBO gave us the rather ridiculous limited series “The Undoing,” about an Upper East Side couple doomed by — I’ll just tell you — husband’s maniacal criminal instincts. But the Fleishmans – Toby, a hepatologist, and Rachel, a highly successful talent agent who breaks under pressure – suffer a more resonant disturbance. Like so many ambitious, accomplished couples in this town, they begin to break up over how much is enough – over the meaning of fulfilling work for its own good and the value of a faded professional status not tied to piles of cash.
The comeback of the independent bookstore
Despite the proliferation of chain stores over the past decade, the ever-present Cheapening of the Discourse, the hours real adults have spent on TikTok, it seems that people are reading again, or at least buying books in the hope that they will do that. have a nice chat with them later. Several independent bookstores — such as Dear Friend in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy, which replaced a real estate agency — opened this year, and several have expanded their footprint. Let the return of literary feuds begin.
The book that confirmed that the city’s health workers are superhuman
“The Desperate Hours” is journalist Marie Brenner’s accessible account of how NewYork-Presbyterian staff handled a one-off public health crisis. The system was so unprepared for the pandemic, the author writes, that academic chairs at member medical schools folded and sorted 600,000 pairs of scrubs, which were bought locally and arrived in mismatched sizes. Ms Brenner interviewed 200 doctors, nurses, assistants, researchers and janitors – many who resented being labeled “heroes” – and ultimately the story being told is the story of courage and agility shown in the face of a company hospital system that did not always have the interests of the employees first.
The gilded renovation that crushed eccentricity
The locally famous pink stucco mansion on Waverly Place belonged to Celeste Martin, the money-poor former Rockette who had inherited a wealth of Greenwich Village real estate from her father, a frustrated artist, in the 1980s. She occupied a small part of the Waverly house and gave the rest to cats and struggling creatives to whom she did not charge rent. After she died a few years ago, in her 90s, the house was bought by Cortney and Robert Novogratz, the designers, reality TV personalities, relations of billionaire investor Mike Novogratz, and creators of their own lines at Bed Bath & Beyond and the Shade Store. Their renovation of the 7,200-square-foot mansion was recently featured on the cover of House Beautiful with an accompanying story in which Ms. Novogratz stated that the couple were not “afraid to take and brighten up a collapsing building,” because “it can totally transform the energy of the neighborhood.” They painted the facade of the house gold.