Dark City: Manhattan Last Spring

MARCH 27, 2020.

MAY 20, 2020.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York City last March, I spent the first weeks of lockdown in my apartment, sick with a mild case. It was just me and my toddler, who was, thankfully, not sick at all. In fact, she had more energy than ever. She thrust picture books into my hands, threw raspberries at the walls, tried to put diapers on our precious single tube of Clorox wipes, and did not understand why we weren't ever leaving the house. Our recycling piled up because I did not want to take my virus-laced breath anywhere. Every night during her bath, the 7 p.m. cheering for front-line workers erupted around us like a clattering, unruly, holy chorus. In those lonely days—trapped in my city and missing my city at once—I kept thinking of Basho's haiku about Kyoto:

          Even in Kyoto—hearing the cuckoo's cry—          I long for Kyoto.

The city outside our windows felt far away because we couldn't be in it, and intimately close because the sirens were constant. Each wailing ambulance was a reminder not just of our swelling hospitals but also of the strangers all around, listening to these same sirens from their separate quarters. We were all going through something together, separately.

During those same early weeks of lockdown, on the other side of the East River, the photographer Dina Litovsky started taking nighttime walks through Manhattan to document the empty streets of a city whose streets were never empty—setting out as soon as it got dark and then returning home two or three hours later. She captured glimpses of the ghost town and its solitary citizens: a man in a red mask standing beneath the cherry-red letters of a Rite Aid awning; a sanitation worker in a hazmat suit descending into the orange glow of the Broadway-Lafayette subway stop; a man jumping rope under streetlights outside the old Village Voice offices. In one photograph, a man in a down jacket and a stiff white mask is walking his dog—a little caramel-colored terrier in a blue-and-orange Knicks sweater—and is turning the corner under the glare of floodlights. Litovsky told me that in those early days of the pandemic, the city felt to her like an empty stage, and you can see it in this photo—the urban landscape as a stage, the sand-colored bricks and clustered cherry blossoms illuminated as if spot lit above the man and his dog. I can remember the cherry blossoms last spring, how they felt like an affront, almost—how dare the spring deliver its regular beauties, as if the world wasn't ending? But it was important to Litovsky to capture

MARCH 31, 2020.

MAY 18, 2020.

that beauty too. She wanted her photographs to feel melancholic but also magical, to hold not just the loss of those days but also the eerie enchantment of the city—how it felt fully hers, in its emptiness, but also not itself.

In crafting these visions of the plague city at night, Litovsky was drawing inspiration from Edward Hopper's paintings of nighttime solitude—not just his evocations of loneliness, but his visions of artificial light as a kind of refuge. You can see these fleeting pockets of refuge all over her city: the emerald orbs of green subway markers; the buttery rectangles of apartment windows; the cold candy-colored affluence of neon; the small islands of incandescence carved by signs and stoplights in the darkness. She would often find the right light, she told me, and then wait for an hour or more for a single person to come by. She returned to the...