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Like all New York stories, this one is a money and real-estate story. Thankfully, this holy weekend, it has a dash of faith thrown in.
“Last Saturday morning, I went to one of our food pantries, Abraham House,” Monsignor Kevin Sullivan said. “It’s two brownstones put together in the Mott Haven section of the South Bronx. Every Saturday morning from 6:30 to 7:30, year-round, we serve 100 people there.”
As executive director of Catholic Charities of New York, the 69-year-old Bronx-born priest is always turning up at one or another of the 90 social-service programs his agency supports or runs. Checking on things, that’s a big part of the job. But at this time of raging pandemic, it’s what the priest saw outside the window that stuck with him.
“Twenty-story apartment buildings,” the eight, brown-brick towers of the Mott Haven Houses. Amid all the urgent calls for social distancing, he knew exactly what that meant.
“There is not the possibility that the individuals in those apartments can socially distance themselves from one another,” Sullivan said. “You may have more than one family living together. You have intergenerational families where grandma is at greater risk. All of us are impacted by this, and everyone understands how absolutely essential this social distancing is. But it’s so much more difficult for the poor, the vulnerable, the lower wage people of New York.”
That same Saturday, the priest got a call about a neighbor of his. Sullivan lives in the rectory of the Church of Our Saviour, which is on Park Avenue and East 38th Street, four blocks south of Grand Central Terminal. “Friends hadn’t heard from him in a while, and they were concerned. I said, “Let me walk over to his apartment” in nearby Kips Bay.
“I spoke to the person at the front desk. We went up. We checked. The man was fine, thanks be to God. On the way down, I said to the guy who was at the front desk, ‘How many people in this building?’ He said, “Oh, we have about 120 units, but only 40 or 50 are occupied now.’” All the other people had somewhere else to go.
“Good for them,” Sullivan said. “But I promise you, the people in the Bronx, in Washington Heights, in parts of Astoria, in Bushwick—they aren’t riding out the pandemic at their second homes. They are in these cramped apartments, risking their health and doing whatever they can do to hang on to dangerous jobs.”
Yes, the fast-spreading coronavirus affects everyone. But it affects some people far more.
The nation’s top infectious-disease experts are sounding the same alarm, highlighting the pandemic’s stark class and racial preferences. According to Dr. Anthony Fauci, COVID-19 is “shining a bright light” on the “unacceptable” health disparities between America’s haves and have-nots.
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“It always seems the poorest people pay the highest price,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreed in his daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday.
At Catholic Charities’ Community Services Center on East 152nd Street in the Bronx, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) outreach coordinator Katherin Morales said she’d witnessed a sudden deluge of people coming in for pre-packed cardboard boxes of food.
“It used to be we saw mostly women, but now a lot of men are coming in,” people who’ve lost their jobs in restaurant kitchens, as school bus drivers or on various delivery routes. “But even with the crisis,” Morales said, “they are scared to apply” for the federal food aid, worried their personal details might be turned over to immigration authorities. “I tell them, ‘You are applying for your children. You have a right to the benefit. Your information is safe.’ All they want to do is feed their family and get back to work.”
One unexpected impact of this two-tiered pandemic in the hot zone of New York: It’s broadened everyone’s understanding of who is truly essential for a modern city to run.
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The cops, firefighters and other first responders are vital, as they always are in times of trouble. So are the health-care professionals, who are finally getting some of the hero worship they so richly deserve. Pots and pans, banged at 7! But it’s also the supermarket shelf stockers, the cleaning crews, the day care attendants, the day laborers and all the food delivery guys, documented and not, from Amazon, AMZN, -0.01% FreshDirect, Grubhub, GRUB, +3.08% DoorDash, UberEATS and the local Chinese and Mexican joints.
Now, they’re toiling in tough jobs with brand-new dangers or they aren’t working at all.
“When I walk outside every morning,” Sullivan said, “I used to see hundreds of people delivering breakfast or carrying things to people in offices. Now, I walk out and there’s nobody on the street. The people who were earning their livings delivering all that stuff, their jobs have disappeared. The white-collar people may be working remotely on their cellphones and iPads. But no one’s figured out how to deliver a pizza on a cellphone.”
Ellis Henican is an author based in New York City and a former newspaper columnist.
