As New York marks the bleak fifth anniversary of Covid-19’s arrival, residents will remember the fear, isolation and death the virus brought. By June 2020, 23,000 people had died of coronavirus in New York City — more than the seating capacity of Madison Square Garden.
But many will also remember that New Yorkers found moments of camaraderie, healing and even joy. Ordinary people pulled off extraordinary things during a difficult time, helping neighbors, neighborhoods and the city. And for some, the experience changed their own lives in profound ways.
Whitney Hu fed hundreds of people in Sunset Park
Whitney Hu loves Sunset Park, a Brooklyn neighborhood of Asian and Latino immigrant families. When her neighbors there found themselves out of work and stuck home during the pandemic, she knew they would need assistance. She had no idea how much.
Ms. Hu, who works in civic engagement, and a few neighbors quickly created a Google spreadsheet of contacts and let people know they would try to help.
“We thought it was going to be very much like: ‘Hey, I need help. If somebody can go grab me a carton of milk, I’ll reimburse you,’” she said. “Quickly, it became so much bigger.”
She said one mother called and asked if she could set up a payment plan for groceries.
“That’s when my brain broke,” Ms. Hu, now 33, said. She found it upsetting to know that one of her neighbors was in such need. She pooled money with other neighbors so that the woman could feed her children.
That was the beginning of South Brooklyn Mutual Aid, and it soon blossomed into more.
“We went from doing individual grocery deliveries to moving to what we call our mass distribution,” Ms. Hu said.
Target Margin Theater, a local playhouse, offered space for them to work out of. But the group soon needed even more capacity and moved to a warehouse in the Brooklyn Army Terminal, near the waterfront. Members raised money and took donations of food, distributing boxes all over the neighborhood. It was labor-intensive. They bought 100-pound bags of rice and repackaged them into smaller individual bags, adding leafy vegetables, tomatoes, fruit, chicken — whatever they could, depending on how much money they had.
After a while, it wasn’t just food: “I had a mother call me, and she was crying because her baby had a rash — because she was reusing her diapers,” Ms. Hu said. “I was like, ‘We’re now doing diapers.’” Group members went to Costco each week and spent about $1,500 on diapers.
Soon, they were handing out 2,500 boxes a week. Between 40 and 50 volunteers worked morning and afternoon shifts to make sure the boxes were packed up and matched with families in need. The group teamed up with churches, schools and anyone who was interested. “We had Chinese seniors and youth group members come in and donate their time,” Ms. Hu said. “It was a real experience. A lot of pizza being ordered.”
And she found that being helpful to others also helped her. “I’ve noticed my ability to be vulnerable and to accept help has completely changed, too,” she said. “I really do have a network of people that I deeply trust — because we went through that.”
Robert Hornsby sang his heart out, and the city joined in
When New Yorkers started banging pots and pans at 7 p.m. as a way to thank essential workers, Robert Hornsby had an idea. He and his best friend, Gary Baker, both sang in the Peace of Heart Choir, performing free concerts at nursing homes and shelters throughout the year, but had to stop because of Covid. They asked themselves: “How can we stay connected to each other?” Mr. Hornsby, now 65, said. The answer, of course, was singing.
Mr. Hornsby and Mr. Baker persuaded two radio stations — WKCR of Columbia University and the listener-supported station WBAI — to broadcast a specific song each week and encourage listeners to sing along from home, aiming their voices out of their windows and into the city.
It was the birth of New York Sings Along, a six-week singalong on Thursday evenings. They started with “New York, New York.”
They posted the information on the choir’s Facebook page. “We had an intro that said: ‘OK, it’s 7 o’clock. Now we’re going to sing this song together,’” Mr. Hornsby said. “Sing as loud as you want, off-key, on-key, whatever.”
Mr. Hornsby, who lives on the Upper West Side, turned his speakers up, leaned out of his window and sang — and soon discovered that his next-door neighbor was also a singer, and someone else in the building was a Broadway performer.
The idea had momentum. “The second week it was more people,” Mr. Hornsby said. “And the third week it was even more people. And the fourth week was like, everybody.”
“The building I live in is 16 floors, and I’m on the seventh floor,” he added. “I’m looking out, and I can see, high, low, all across — the whole neighborhood joined in!”
The singing spread across New York and beyond: “We got videos from the Midwest,” Mr. Hornsby said. “We got videos from the West Coast. We got videos from Florida. We got videos from Beijing, China.”
The original Facebook group quickly grew from 100 to 8,000 people. “Every single comment thanked us for coming up with a way for people to express themselves and to grab a little joy in an otherwise dismal time,” he said.
They sang “Lean on Me,” and “Stand by Me” and “You’ve Got a Friend.” For the finale, in May 2020, they returned to “New York, New York,” the Liza Minnelli version.
Mr. Hornsby, a media consultant, believes the singalong caught on because the virus was so frightening, and the lockdown was so isolating. “There was this enormous thirst for something fun, something to take us out of the moment,” he said, “even for just a little while.”
Hector Gerardo saw neighbors struggling to afford food and was inspired to start farming
Hector Gerardo, who is known as Freedom, never thought he would be a farmer. Five years ago, he was working on a program inside the High School for Environmental Studies in Manhattan.
“We were doing gardening,” he said, “and we had chicken coops on the rooftop.”
When Covid hit, the program was shut down. By that summer, Mr. Gerardo, now 41, developed his own initiative, guiding youth volunteers in low-income neighborhoods to come up with mutual aid ideas to help their communities. The result? Four community refrigerators, in the South Bronx and in Manhattan, offering free fresh food and pantry items, donated from Mr. Gerardo’s own home garden, as well as from businesses and churches.
At the same time, Mr. Gerardo and his wife, Elizabeth Guerra, decided that they needed more space. They had always grown vegetables on their fire escape in Upper Manhattan near Fort Tryon Park, and even had a little compost bucket. But helping people who were struggling with food insecurity spurred them. “We realized that we needed to go back to the land, and be stewards of the land,” he said.
He and his wife, who is also his partner in the endeavor, bought three acres in Danbury, Conn., named it SeaMarron Farmstead, and moved with their three children into a house there.
Now they grow all sorts of food — greens, tomatoes, garlic — and keep chickens and bees. There’s also hemp for bio-based materials. They started a community-supported agriculture program and organized gardening workshops. And they welcome their neighbors — mostly Latino, a lot of migrant workers — to plant small gardens. “We pay the mortgage, but people can come in and use the land. Because land should be free for everybody.”
He would love to have New York City high school kids visit. “We still want to bring the young people so they can see that farmers don’t look just like white people,” laughed Mr. Gerardo, who is African Caribbean.
Though the worst of the pandemic was a dark time, he feels he emerged better. “We are eating healthier,” he said. “And we’ve become a little bit more autonomous. That’s one thing that I learned from the pandemic is that we can be a little bit more autonomous and do things on our own.”
The Rev. Kimberly Detherage kept her flock together
With illness all around and institutions shutting down, the Rev. Kimberly Detherage was not sure she would be able to keep her church open. But she knew she wanted to do right by her congregation at St. Mark A.M.E. Church in Jackson Heights, Queens.
“I approached this as if we were in a battle, and we were going to win the battle,” she said.
Her first big test was a heartbreaker: the death of Irvin Eadie, vice chairman of the church steward board, whom she described as “a major force in the church.”
There were so many public health restrictions that the church could not hold a normal funeral, so Ms. Detherage reached out to Mr. Eadie’s daughter, Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council.
“I said, ‘Would you mind the funeral home driving the hearse by the church so that people who wanted to come out can see him?’” she said. Ms. Adams agreed.
“More people than I expected came out, and were able to have closure,” Ms. Detherage said. “And the family was very grateful.”
It was the beginning of a long season of finding new ways to hold the community together.
She turned to her faith for inspiration. “You know the Gospels?” she said. “‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed’ — what does it look like in these days and times?”
Ms. Detherage, now 64, held online services, teaching older church members how to use Zoom, when that still felt new. She teamed up with hospitals and the Health Department to set up Covid testing and vaccinations for her congregation. She also organized Black History Month and Women’s History Month programs in which older congregants told younger ones their life stories. She kept the church’s food pantry open, using the parking lot as a safer, outdoor distribution center. “We made sure people had eggs and butter and cheese,” she said.
The funerals were the toughest part, with delays for services and cremation. “So many people were dying, they couldn’t handle it,” she said.
Ms. Detherage found that going through a traumatic time strengthened her bonds with her congregation. That’s what she gained through this time: “Relationships,” she said, “knowing people and who they are and where they’ve come from — and what their story is.”
Jona Tajonera’s company tested 2,000 people a day
Jona Tajonera’s sister died of Covid during the early weeks of the pandemic in April 2020, shattering her family. They could not hold a proper funeral for fear of more infection. “Everything was online,” she said.
Ms. Tajonera, who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, slipped into a depression.
“I went through it for a few months, and finally I snapped out of it and I said, you know what? I got to do something,” she said. “And my friend said, ‘Do something that will make your sister happy.’”
That’s when Ms. Tajonera, who is a consultant in health care administration, started U.S. Mobile Medical Care Group, a company that, with funding from the Department of Health, offered free Covid testing from tents on the streets of New York. Soon, she had more than 20 locations, and the company was testing more than 2,000 people a day.
“There were lines for blocks and blocks,” she said.
Ms. Tajonera was still at it in 2021 when a new variant of Covid, called Omicron, hit the city. There were times she only slept for two hours a night. “Sometimes I would just doze off in the car,” she said. “It was bad. It was really bad.” She faced each day with positivity, though. “People were really so very grateful for what we were doing, and that gave us more strength,” she said. “They gave us the power to say, OK, we’ve got to save the world.”
Now 55, Ms. Tajonera said she learned an important lesson over the past five years. “I appreciate life more now than before,” she said. “I have gratitude for waking up every day.”
She folded up the testing business in 2022 and returned to her work as a consultant in health care administration. But she’s also going back to school, studying to become a mental health counselor. “It’s something that I feel good about doing. And I think I’ll be able to help more people,” she said.
Marco Castillo helped spread the word, in Mixtec and Nahuatl
When Covid hit, delivery workers became essential workers. In New York, many of them were Mexican and Guatemalan immigrants who were unable to read or understand pandemic cautions in English or even Spanish.
Marco Antonio Castillo Martinez, 48, a Mexican social anthropologist and one of the founders of a nonprofit organization called Red de Pueblos Trasnacionales, made it his mission to get critical health information to delivery workers in Indigenous languages, including Mixtec, Nahuatl and Tlapanec.
“When it comes to all of this medical lingo being used, Spanish was not enough,” he said.
The organization, based in the South Bronx but with members citywide, usually focuses on educating the community about their rights as immigrants, as well as holding workshops and organizing festivals and cultural events.
There were between 40 and 80 families across the city — almost 300 individuals — for whom Mr. Castillo’s organization provided reliable information in Indigenous languages.
Some of them are not written languages, so Mr. Castillo and his partners in the network created video and audio messaging channels. The task was complex. “Many of these Indigenous languages are very different, based on pronunciation, and it changes from town to town,” he said.
The group also provided financial aid and worked with the North American Indigenous Center of New York to distribute food in the Bronx. “That was also beautiful,” he said. “The pandemic brought together Native Americans and Indigenous immigrants to support each other.”
Despite the loss and grief brought by the pandemic, Mr. Castillo said that their overall sense of connection was strengthened.
“The most important thing is that people felt supported by their community,” he said. “And reminded that what they brought from their communities is not something to be forgotten or discarded or ignored.”
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