Food delivery workers and their e-bikes have become ubiquitous across the city.
New York in the time of Eric Adams has become surreal and dislocating even by the city’s lofty historical standards. Its overlapping crises — mental health, housing, immigration, identity — have collided with enough force to knock the city itself off its bearings, overpowering the head-down-keep-it-moving impulse that has long been our default setting. There is no staring at phones, no overinspecting subway ads, pretending not to see.
Thousands of homeless people sleep on the streets and in the subway system as commuters and pedestrians pass by.
Fare beaters hurdle turnstiles every day as a matter of course.
Drugstores keep sundries locked away from shoplifters — and everyone else.
Migrant mothers trudge through moving train cars with sleeping newborns strapped to their backs, selling marked-up candy. Men warm their bare legs over steaming curbside grates outside $10 million apartments, tattered sweatpants around their shins, as packs of deliveristas e-rocket past them ferrying $100 app orders from ghost kitchens. Drugstores protect toothpaste and deodorant as if they were launch codes, to be accessed only by uniformed authorities with keys. Undocumented middle schoolers in Brooklyn tuck little red cards into their pockets outlining their rights, as the new secretary of homeland security, fresh from South Dakota, hits the Bronx in a bulletproof vest and camera-ready makeup for a predawn raid tied to Venezuelan gang violence.
Migrants waiting outside Midtown Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel, which city officials have called “the new Ellis Island.”
Men warming themselves over steaming grates outside Gramercy Park, a greensward so exclusive it requires a key.