The World Historical Year 2020: The Community Aftermath of Trump's Failure

During our convalescence from mid-March through mid-April 2020, our imaginations feasted on the grim details that were emerging. Refrigerated trucks were brought to hospitals in Brooklyn and Queens to account for the exploding number of deaths.¹ Governor Cuomo warned of demand outstripping supply of ventilators.². Field hospital tents were pitched in Central Park to create more-spaced triage capabilities for the Upper East Side’s hospitals.

My colleagues had generations of co-congregants of certain generations vanish at church and temple . Lauren had friends whose parents entered hospitals where they were to stay weeks. During early-to-mid April we remained sequestered in our home with the brief errands recounted in the previous installment. It wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration to say that we didn’t leave home (outside of A-to-B trips for necessities) until the last of April, 2020.

And when we emerged from our month of sickness, quarantine, and extreme caution, we found death everywhere. Here’s one death that shows how the magnificent tapestry of New York City is held together by knots of single individuals.

His name was “Steve the Bookman.”

Steve’s Book Table

In sunnier times, some of the joys of life along Broadway are the small vendors that appear next to cafés and restaurants or on busy corners. In Fall, they sell berets; in the Spring, they sell flower bundles; in the Winter, they sell scarves.

On West 96^th and Broadway, most of the sunny weeks of the year, you could find Steve. On our way to the Westside grocery store, where foot traffic narrowed by the NYC Link kiosk and comers-and-goers to the T-Mobile shop, you’d find his tables and their wares. On a neat pair of tables you’d see his array of paperbacks and coffee-table books.

The books were always arranged by a logic that only he knew: books of Impressionism would lie next to books of economics, next to German Romanticism. You could give the table a glance without stopping your Manhattan 2/4 time click of feet, or you could idle for a thorough perusal. Either way, you were welcome at the tables provided you didn’t disturb the pedestrian highway of Broadway’s sidewalk too much.

If you paused for a moment, Steve would often be busy talking to a fellow book-browser or a fellow sidewalk merchant. In the Spring, the dappled sunlight would play around the plaza of the 96^th street station and you could find an ambitious read on his tables. Or, in Summer, before hopping a train at the station headed toward the beach, you could pick up a pulpy paperback for a few sweaty dollars. Or, as Fall cloaked the sun, you could find that German luminary’s work that you’d always meant to read (For my part, I bought a copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther from him). If free from other concerns, he might talk to you about the book, wish you well, or talk about the news of the neighborhood.

A few steps from him, bagels were vended. You could take your new book and read a few pages while you waited for an everything bagel to toast. Or, if it was the end of a busy day you could grab a beer at the 7-11 and take the book home as you cranked the A/C. At 96^th you could hook a left or a right and head to one of the parks with your new book and hear the sounds and see the sights of Manhattan’s oases of repose.

Despite the fact that you could buy access to all the world’s music and literature just a few steps away at the T-Mobile shop, Steve remained a hold-out of a New York gone past like Schrafft’s. In more temperate seasons, he was a sharp dresser. I never knew, but I always felt he had a history in jazz somehow, like he’s played gigs in Harlem in an age gone past.

He was a fixture. He was our fixture.

Until he wasn’t. As the image says, he died in Presbyterian of COVID-19.

Re-Entry

We didn’t know this grim news was awaiting us as we made our first sojourns from the house. The car traffic volume was near zero and the number of pedestrians along Broadway could be measured in the single digits. The only swiftly moving souls were the essential workers in masks and scrubs and bike delivery staff laden with plastic bags. As we timidly padded north, we came to Steve’s corner and, on the glass walls of the T-Mobile shop (that had been closed for the last several weeks), we saw a home-made memoriam taped up on the walls. I took this picture:

Never more would we see that book seller sweating beneath an August sun. Never more would we see him curiously debonair and well-dressed in the altogether too-brief transition seasons of Spring and Fall. Never more would we have him fit into an anecdote of someone visiting us here in NYC.

Never more.

You see, when our leaders failed to take the virus seriously, they let it get an edge on the cultures and the people of our city. And so, while Lauren and I were passed over, Steve was not. New York will be ever the poorer for it.

Donald Trump, j’accuse.

Steve’s Book Table

Re-Entry

Footnotes