Five Years on, Has the Pandemic Gone Down a Memory Hole?
Urban Matters: First, congratulations on the publication of When the City Stopped. It skillfully recaptures so much about living through the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. It brings back the isolation, anxiety, hardship, and grief, while also recounting so many moving acts of devotion, humanity, and courage.
In this book you weave together interviews, diary excerpts, after-the-fact recollections, poetry. How much material did you sift through? What did you learn that you hadn’t expected? Do you regret leaving anything out?
Robert W. Snyder: I read through hundreds of oral history interviews and then more poems, first-person narratives, and student papers collected by oral historians, folklorists, teachers, and archivists. When it came time to select maybe a tenth of it all for publication, I discovered that the most compelling material covered the courage and solidarity of essential workers who faced danger every day to keep the city running. Within that, I was especially impressed by the ingenuity of health care professionals who invented new ways to do their work, from the bottom up, to care for New Yorkers suffering from Covid.
You’re right, it was painful to exclude material that didn’t fit the final frame of the book. I’m thinking here of an interview with a woman who shared an apartment with her sister; they held regular dance parties for just themselves, to keep their spirits up. Also, the woman who improvised an at-home gym so she could stay in shape during lockdown.
UM: Rob, I agree that some of the book’s most gripping stories convey how the pandemic’s onset overwhelmed the city’s emergency medical services and hospitals, and describe the crushing physical and emotional burdens that put on those in the frontline. Endless ambulance sirens; mass graves; refrigerator truck morgues in Central Park: did it give people you interviewed PTSD reliving all that? And what emotional effect did it have on you?
Snyder: For me, the worst memory that came back in doing my research was of the confusion that resulted from the absence of scientific certainty in the pandemic’s early days. If you walk in the park, could a passing jogger infect you? Would a bandanna around your face protect you? Could you catch Covid-19 from handling a newspaper?
But of course, for the essential workers and their families who gave interviews, it was often much worse. When I interviewed Veronica Fletcher, the wife of transit worker Trevor Fletcher who died of Covid-19, we both wound up crying. I asked her if she wanted to stop and she said ‘no.’ I figured that if she could get though it I could too, and we did.
UM: In a cautionary way, you several times reference the collective amnesia that seemingly erased memories of the worldwide post-World War I influenza epidemic, which killed some 20,000 New Yorkers. The Covid death toll here was over twice that. But still: could the pandemic go down a similar memory hole? And isn’t it just natural for people to want to forget such wrenching and frightening events? Why shouldn’t we?
Snyder: For New Yorkers, the pandemic has already gone down a memory hole. I think the proof of that is how, in 2024, Donald Trump got more votes in New York City than he did in 2020. Oral history interviews conducted in 2020 repeatedly conveyed that New Yorkers were furious at Trump over how badly he handled the pandemic.
The problem with forgetting those difficult years – which, I agree, is a perfectly human way of coping – is that we won’t learn anything from the ordeal of Covid that will help us prepare for the next public health emergency. After all, the virus that caused Covid-19 is still with us, other viruses are out there, and diseases can be transmitted internationally in a routine jet flight. In New York City, the health care inequalities and crowded housing conditions that made the pandemic so deadly here are still with us.
UM: Okay, final question. In the book’s conclusion, you express the hope that the Covid experience will lead to renewed social solidarity and a more egalitarian public health system. But here we are, at the fifth anniversary of the pandemic’s onset. What’s the evidence that those outcomes that you wish for will happen?
Snyder: It’s an uphill fight but a necessary one, because in matters of communicable disease the health of each of us is bound up with the health of all of us.
Covid-19 struck a country that was already bitterly divided in matters of politics and culture, and our passage through the pandemic sharpened existing divisions over vaccines and the authority of public health officials. If we are going to learn something from the ordeal of Covid-19 – and I think we must if we are to prevent a similar disaster in the future – I think we should begin with the essential workers who went out, worked, and kept the city running so that the rest of us could survive. Their courage, generosity, and solidarity are traits that we all can admire.
Robert W. Snyder is Manhattan Borough Historian and professor emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. When the City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers will be published in March, 2025 by Three Hills Books, an imprint of Cornell University Press.
Photo by: Navy Medicine