more Hurricane Sandy- Tuesday

Piers Morgan noted tonight in his CNN programme that New York is living somewhat “a double-life” after the hurricane. And in truth that seems spot on: a walk up and down 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue from 45th to 70th finds every bar and restaurant packed with clientele. Surely most of these people aren’t from lower Manhattan. Average spend per person at least $20-$50 including tax and tip. Hmmm…and Morgan didn’t give the representatives of the hospital generator failure (New York University Langone) an easy time either. Not to diminish the diligence and courage of staff who evacuated newborn babies and at risk patients. But! How could this happen in a major New York hospital? There are many uncomfortable questions to answer post-devastation. One can’t be blamed for wanting to have a pre-Hurricane ‘knees-up’. But nor can one be excused for avoiding many of the difficult questions that need answering after such an event. And with all due respect, it’s very hard to find much sympathy for the Upper West and Upper East denizens who never seem to suffer the ‘slings and arrows’ of living in NYC. Happy hill rather than ‘happy valley’.

As a postscript to the previous post, as you’d expect Manhattanites are flocking to above 39st street for food and power. At one bank (to remain nameless) ATM foyer a resourcful community had gathered to power their electronic devices. One older lady recounted that as a one-street away resident to the 14 th Street Edison power station explosion she thereafter repeated tried phoning 311 (the emergency line for non-life threatening calls) with no success.  But as one CNN reporter stated, ‘New Yorkers expect everything yesterday’. The lady had 6 cats and leg and knee problems that prevented her from evacuating with her pets. Many residents, though, at least have functioning gas with which to cook. Mention, of course, must be made of New Jersey shore residents who took the brunt of the hurricane. Extraordinary footage of boardwalks uprooted like trees and hurled into mainstreets 100s of meters away.

Hurricane Sandy- New York City

What more to be said about Hurricane Sandy that has just devastated lower Manhattan and most adjacent boroughs? It’s akin to war zones where one reads of yet another death and the fact is relegated to a statistic by most who are not next of kin and who are far from the scene. Remarkably there have been very few deaths caused by Sandy. And if you’re not where the action is it’s hard to imagine the havoc and trauma wrought by such a blast from nature. Study the uprooted trees: it's not that far from assessing the impact of a land mine.

Given that New York is unlike almost any other city in the world it’s remarkable that there is so little chaos after the event last night. All mass transit is suspended, all lower Manhattan subway tunnels flooded and unusable for at least 4 days. There is total blackout in lower Manhattan for all streets below 39th due to the flooding of Con Ed’s power station at E14th. Explosions lit up the night sky. Check the map! That’s a HUGE chunk of Manhattan that has been crippled. You would expect looting and chaos. Yet there is calm and consideration. What a difference one street block makes. A wine merchant doing brisk trade this morning on 41^st said that he’d lose $10,000 per day if he’d been ‘the wrong side of the tracks’. Whilst a deli owner just below 39th claimed $2,000 a day in lost trade. Do the math. It's frightening!

The crane that had partially collapsed on the upper floors of a 57th street midtown luxury apartment development thankfully followed the rules of gravity and its vertical weight (though scarily precarious) kept it from swinging further in the 100mph winds. The pause for thought in all this is, though,  that the New Yorkers who can least afford to be hit are the ones who’ll suffer from Sandy’s might. And that’s the very strange paradox of New York City. A Republican Mayor Bloomberg (concise, calming, apolitical in his press briefings) presiding over a (for the Manhattan isle most part) Democratic populace. A city that thrives and survives arguably on the wealth of a very few- the real estate deals, the parties, the stock exchange, the glamour. When what REALLY makes NYC a city at all are the small businesses, the ‘little’ people, the public workers without whom NYC would just not exist. Are the very few willing to dip into their pockets and save New York from future storms? I think not. And how, anyways pragmatically, do you shore up a city that for the most part is shoreline?

The category 1 Hurricane Sandy became a category 3 hurricane because of the peculiar wind/tidal patterns of the ‘New York bite’. Add a full moon and high tide at the time of landfall and nature’s armada became invincible. In all of its 108 years NYC’s subway system has never known a worst disaster. And the impending event was incredibly difficult for many: should I stay or should I go. Mayor Bloomberg’s mandatory evacuation of the low lying Zone A areas was not legally enforceable. And you can well understand many good citizens’ trepidation at moving from the comfort of their own home to a crowded shelter. There is a very regrettable selfish, conceited hard core of people in New York who revel in the reflected glory of their ‘goodness’. But it’s very doubtful that the people of the housing projects, shopkeepers and others financially debilitated by this event would ever fit that description. It’s so like Ang Lee’s latest film Life of Pi: everyone has to share the same boat – both man and tiger-and the concluding story one lives to tell is usually just too, too unbelievable.

CLOSING NIGHT - New York 2012

Denzel Washington (Flight)

John Goodman and Don Cheadle

Press conference HERE
Morephotos HERE of the opening night.

and maybe even a review to come......;)