I Miss You, NYC

It's Throwback Thursday, so I posted this photo on Instagram tonight from two years ago, the first time Nancy and I had ever been to baseball's Opening Day (and the first time we ever descended the precariously steep escalator to the Hudson Yards subway station).

We rode one of the MTA museum's 7 Trains to Citi Field that day.

I happily snapped photos of the train's arrival, and we sat in one of the 50-year-old "redbird" cars.

My Uncle Charlie had taken me to my first MLB game on one of those same subway cars, arriving to then newly-built Shea Stadium, across from the World's Fair, and ascending to our seats in the precariously steep nose-bleed section of Shea Stadium.

Hudson Yards station

That first ride on the 7 Train was a rite of passage for me, full of odd and eye-opening sights I had never seen as a boy growing up in the New Jersey suburbs. Things were different in New York, in a profound way.

Just like when I rode the train with Uncle Charlie in the 1960s, on Opening Day 2018 the tinny subway sound system played the hokey song "Meet the Mets" when we arrived at the ballpark station. That was a great day, and Nancy and I bought tickets for the Mets home opener in 2019... and Opening Day 2020 too.

But that game didn't take place today.

New York is on lockdown. No one knows when the baseball season will start, and everyone grimly accepts this fact given the current life-and-death Covid-19 scenarios.

In "an abundance of caution," our New York City office, like so many others, has been closed these past two weeks. I haven't been to the city since Friday, March 13th.

My daughter is currently on lockdown in a Manhattan apartment, but she assures us she's fine. I keep wanting to drive to the city to "save" her, but I really think I want to drive there to save myself.

I'm very much in love with New York. I'm a little worried about how it will change in the coming months.

My Google Photos folder is filled with past images of the city. And, more often than not, these are the photos that Google's mysterious algorithm chooses to "auto-stylize." Here's an example:

St. Patrick's Cathedral

In fact, here's an entire folder of 120 images of New York City that Google has auto-stylized for me (often, nostalgically, editing them in black and white).

When I've worked in New York these past few months, I've taken cell phone photos all the time. The city is full of beauty and life, architecture and art... and still odd and eye-opening sights.

Most recently, on March 11, I posted this photo on Twitter of Times Square and one of my favorite places, Grand Central Terminal:

It was a Wednesday morning (evidenced by GCT's iconic brass and onyx four-sided clock). I was simply struck by how far fewer people there were than usual in pre-lockdown Manhattan.

A BuzzFeed editor saw the tweet and asked to add the Grand Central photo to the end of a story, "24 Shocking Pictures of Famous Places Before and After the Coronavirus Outbreak." All fine... until Complex Media re-posted the photo on Instagram in this way:

In a little more than half an hour, more than 34,000 people had "liked" the post, but the comments were turning rapidly ugly.

Pictures don't tell the whole story, and there was certainly more context to the BuzzFeed post. In contrast, Complex's stark Instagram post looked... odd... showing Grand Central at an obviously different time. People were commenting that my photo was inflaming fear.

Magically, just as the photo began to go viral in a bad way, Complex deleted the post. So ended my brief reign as a perpetrator of fake news.

The lesson: a picture is (possibly) worth a thousand (misleading) words.

That is, unless it's a photo of New York City in the distance, without any words at all: