Hurricane Sandy-Saturday

These Hurricane Sandy posts began with an analogy to NYC being a war zone. Over the past week that image has only blasted brighter. The bigger picture is most indeed that.  Do the math on how many pregnant mothers must be without normal facilities- heat, power, elevators, food etc. How many very young kids, elderly people etc etc etc. That’s a lot of folk. And that’s JUST in lower Manhattan. Did Mayor Bloomberg do the right thing cancelling Sunday’s classic NY Marathon? I think so. Should he have made that decision earlier and avoided runners struggling to reach NYC by plane from all over the world? It's easier to judge in hindsight. And I loathe writing in first person but I’m only writing these posts because it’s the I in me that feels such a mixture of anger, respect, hope, frustration. Staten Island and many non-Manhattan sites are still a war zone. So going ahead with the Marathon (starting on Staten Island) whilst a few miles away people couldn’t even grieve because NO facilities were back on line! It would be tantamount to giving those residents the finger and saying we’re Manhattan and you’re just a cheap-skate ‘bridge and tunnel’ crowd who we love milking for money to see our great isle of Manhattan.

I could so easily have been staying in the blackout zone of Manhattan. Selfish, seeming nice folk booted me out (another story) less than a week ago and reasonably priced accommodation I found above 39th Street. I kinda wished I was down there in the thick of it and yet so relieved, obviously, that I wasn’t. I happened on a pop-up photo gallery midtown East side last night and met a young businesswoman quietly sporting a visible facial bruise from bumping into a wall walking up and down 23 stories to her apartment. Do the math. And it was so surreal that a young, Irish photographer was plugging away at selling artistic (non-flooded) photos of New York one day before his pop-up expired.

I wanted to go on drinking, even find sex, at one of the plethora of bars on the East Side that night but it just made me burst into tears. Were they tears of anger, helplessness, frustration that I didn’t have the guts to go into some of those establishments and shout how can you lead a normal ffffing life while the temperature is dropping into real cold for many people in this city barely 10 blocks away in addition to them having  no normal life. Let alone Staten Island, Rockaway…

The next time you read a war correspondent such as Robert Fisk or Maggie O'Kane just marvel and wonder at how level headed and seemingly detached they are (not that anyone could level detachment at Fisk but you get the point;). I remember an award winning Guardian photographer at a Q&A of his work noting passionately how annoyed he was that he was expected to be something of a humanitarian in African trouble spots plus a photographer. Not having had that experience I completely agreed with his frustration. After being in NYC for Hurricane Sandy his point is blisteringly clear.

It’s not just remarkable but extraordinary how most of the subway system will be up and running by Monday, less than a week after Sandy hit. Tunnels not just flooded but with water up to a few feet from the top of the street stairs. Not everything functioned as the Mayor hoped. But then how could it? You’d be furious too standing hours in line early cold morning waiting for water and they’d cocked up the delivery time. And in a month’s time Sandy will be a distant memory for much of Manhattan that was unaffected. Or will it? Certainly not for me. I’ll never drink another glass of free private view wine, the art, without having Hurricane Sandy rustling somewhere in that picture. Is that too emotive? What else could one be!