frank bruni Hey, Dad. frank's dad Yeah. frank bruni For dinner tonight, what do you want? I can bake you some chicken. frank's dad Yeah. frank bruni We can have tomato and cheese mac. frank's dad Yeah. frank bruni Or we can throw out all the rules, and we can do breakfast for dinner, and I can make some eggs, sausage, and toast. frank's dad The last thing. frank bruni You want breakfast for dinner? frank's dad Yeah, why not? frank bruni Break all the rules, two bachelors? speaker Sure.

frank bruni

I’m Frank Bruni. That was my dad, and this is “The Argument.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

frank bruni I like to put a little milk in with them. And I like to add some cheese. And I hope he’s down with that. We will find out.

frank bruni

Michelle and Ross are off this week, so I’m taking over the show. I’m recording today from my dad’s house just outside New York City. He’s 85 years old, and I’ve been taking care of him since the country went on lockdown.

frank bruni Oh, are you going to help set the table? frank's dad No, you’ve already done that. You got some ice? frank bruni I just can’t see having — the question of whether red or white wine goes with scrambled eggs I think is answered by neither, right? frank's dad No, I think neither should. frank bruni Yeah. I could use a night off. frank's dad Right. frank bruni You feeling good about this choice of scrambled eggs for dinner? frank's dad Absolutely. frank bruni You sure? frank's dad I love it. Yeah. frank bruni All right. I’m feeling a little pressure here, because I don’t know that I’ve ever— frank's dad Don’t feel it. I love it. frank bruni All right. You’re going to have to be kind in your judgment, OK? frank's dad Frank, don’t worry about it. frank bruni [CHUCKLES] frank's dad I love it. And I — whatever. frank bruni OK.

frank bruni

Helping my dad is a small part of the larger story of people helping one another right now.

frank's dad I think it’s almost good. I think times like this bring the populace together. frank bruni On my podcast this week, in fact, my colleague Ginia Bellafante and I are going to talk about that, what we’ve learned about New York, which she writes about, and through New York, and with New York as a microcosm, what we’re learning about America — the bad and the good. frank's dad Times like this make us think more, and make us appreciate more what we have. frank bruni My colleague Ginia Bellafante has been writing about this. She’s the Times’s Big City columnist, weighing in on the culture, the politics — the anthropology, really — of New York City. She’s also a dear friend, which makes me doubly excited to have her on “The Argument” to talk about how the pandemic is straining and changing our society. Ginia, let’s start here. You’ve seen the city respond to many disasters. What’s different about New Yorkers’ response to the coronavirus?

ginia bellafante

Well, I’ll tell you. It feels quite primitive. Nobody was really expecting a virus — an outbreak of infectious disease. Since 9/11, if you’ve lived in New York these 20 years, you’re worried about getting killed in the subway from a bomb, or you’re worried about sarin gas being unleashed in Grand Central Station. So this really comes out of the blue, and people are in shock because our lives are so very different, and we don’t know what to expect in the coming months. We had some experience with Sandy. Again, I think that when Sandy hit New York, people thought, well, these hurricanes are things that happen in southeastern Florida, in Mississippi. People were shocked by that. And it gave us some sense of disaster preparedness. But really, really, we were not in any way, shape, or form ready logistically, strategically, psychologically to deal with what we’re dealing with now.

frank bruni

Well, we don’t know what the recovery from this is like. We knew that with the hurricane, as time went by, we’d rebuild, and the disaster would recede in the rear view mirror. We don’t know what we’re going to be dealing with two months, four months, nine months from now, right?

ginia bellafante

Exactly. We’ve had a tremendous loss of jobs already. The optimistic predictions for the year from city officials are a loss of 475,000 jobs in New York City. Interesting note is that after 9/11, we lost in the first three months after 9/11 about 430,000 jobs. So that’s similar. However, we were already in an economic downturn then, and we plummeted into a recession after 9/11 in the city.

frank bruni

I want to come back to how the city does or doesn’t recover and the various economic implications, but first, I want to talk about your most recent Big City column from last weekend, because it was something of a viral sensation — hugely, hugely read. It was about Joe Joyce, the owner of a beloved bar in Brooklyn. Can you tell us about him and what happened to him?

ginia bellafante

Yeah. So Joe Joyce, I had heard about through a close friend and neighbor named Eddie Joyce, who lives on my block in Brooklyn. And I always ended up in conversations with Eddie about his dad, who was a very interesting character politically, because he was very conservative Trump-supporting, but progressive in many ways in terms of his social ideologies. He owned a bar, popular bar in Bay Ridge. He was a very devoted listener to Fox News. And his kids said, please don’t go on this cruise to Spain, which he had planned for March 1 with his wife. And he wasn’t quite convinced that the coronavirus was a big threat, and he went to Spain. Came back two weeks later, got sick around the 20th of March or so, and died pretty quickly. Died in April.

frank bruni

Well, what do you see as the obvious and the less obvious morals of his story?

ginia bellafante

Well, I think the obvious one is that we are slaves to the partisan news sources from which we get our information. I think this affects both the right and the left, obviously. And there was a real distrust. There is a distrust of science on the right, certainly. And I believe the less obvious lesson in his entire story is really that people are incredibly complicated in their politics. We tend to caricature people. And we have to really learn to look, and appreciate, and understand people’s complexities, because Joe was not anyone you could easily categorize.

frank bruni

You know, part of what I loved — I loved much about your column, but part of what I loved about it was that very theme, that very element. It wasn’t right there at the top, but as you went along, you took great pains to write about the fact that while Joe was a big Trump supporter, while he was a big watcher of Fox News, he was also someone whose bar became a place where gay and straight mingled together happily. He was someone who gave to organizations that represented disabled children. He was, in fact, a very, very generous small-time philanthropist in his own way. I think — and I’m curious for your thoughts on this — that if we are going to get through this pandemic as a country, we have to learn to see each other across the political divide in much more nuanced ways. And to me, your column was a great encouragement of that.

ginia bellafante

Yes. Thank you. I do think— obviously, the rift was so huge — as you and I have talked about before, the rift was so huge before all this. And it’s getting deeper and more severe. And to really try — this involves really talking and getting to know people. And many of us live in these very politically-isolated enclaves either in coastal cities, in rural red state places. And we don’t meet, and talk to, and have intimate conversations with people who believe things different from what we believe. And one great thing about New York is, in certain neighborhoods, you can get that kind of conversation going. And that’s really what we want for the rest of the country, these kinds of conversations.

frank bruni

At its best, that’s exactly what New York is. But New York is also a place — as you’ve written, and I want to turn to this, it’s a place where you see especially vivid manifestation of the class divide. And that has been something that’s really come to the fore during this pandemic. I want to quote from a column you wrote right at the start of the lockdown in New York City. And the headline was “The Rich Have a Coronavirus Cure: Escape From New York.” And you wrote this. “Broad-scale emergencies never fail to reveal the fault lines in the American class system. And it was suddenly clear that well-off New Yorkers were going to go about the business of combating the coronavirus differently, with more than fortitude and Purell, because they had a powerful inoculant — secondary real estate.” [CHUCKLING] Talk a little bit more about that, and how — and in this sense, I think New York is both a microcosm and a magnifying glass for the whole country. Talk about how you’ve seen the class divide writ large during this pandemic.

ginia bellafante

Absolutely. It’s a really interesting phenomenon, because you go — in these wealthier, affluent neighborhoods of New York, they’re ghost towns. You walk around the Upper East Side, or Brooklyn Heights, and these places are empty because people have fled. People have rented houses, if they don’t actually own houses in beach places on the East Coast. And so we’re seeing that flight at the same time that you’re seeing this massive unemployment. Waiters, dishwashers. Half of hotels in New York City are not operating. And you see people suddenly with no reserves of savings just flat-out in the context of a city that had some of the highest rent and rent burdens in the country. So where do we really — where do we go from here?

frank bruni

Well, where do we go from here? How does that play out in New York? As you said, there are many, many New Yorkers who their savings have been wiped out. They’re in industries that if those industries come back, they’re going to come back very sluggishly. Are those people able to remain in the city? What does the city need to do, and what can it do to accommodate them and make sure it doesn’t end up moving ever further into the realm of a gilded theater for the rich?

ginia bellafante

Right. There are nostalgics who wish and crave for the creativity, and vitality, and grittiness of New York in the ‘70s. And your question is, are they going to get that wish now? Is it going to go back? The downside of that, obviously, would be the crime rates and fiscal crisis of the ‘70s, which could certainly happen. The upside, of course, is that you do see flight and diminished housing costs that might make room for middle class and working class people to have more normal lives in New York. For families not with three kids to be crowded into tiny, tiny two-bedroom apartments. For people to have a little more access to New York.

frank bruni

So you think this could actually pull us back from overdone, overwrought gentrification.

ginia bellafante

I honestly — I’m wary of prediction, but I do think that there is a real possibility for that. Alternatively, there’s a possibility that the city becomes a more cartoonish, piratic version of what it already is. Who’s going to be able to afford to stay? The banker, the investment bankers, the private equity people who are somewhat insulated from these downturns and can afford to go to East Hampton the next time a big pandemic comes around. We certainly might see a more dystopian version of this inequality, where there really, really, really just is the very, very, very rich and the struggling unemployed. It could certainly go in that direction. I hope it doesn’t.

frank bruni

Yeah, I don’t know how we get much more dystopian, to be honest, than the current moment. I’m just so haunted every time a package is delivered to the front stoop here in my dad’s house, every time I do go out to the grocery store and I’m interacting with a clerk. I’m just haunted by this notion that there’s army of people who have to work, and are taking enormous personal risks in terms of the possibility of becoming infected so that everyone else can shelter more securely. And the gulf between those two realities is just so wide to me and so haunting. And I don’t know how we look at it and don’t make adjustments in this city and in this country going forward.

ginia bellafante

It does feel terrible, to be relatively safe in your house — and I saw an Amazon worker pulling up with his entire family in the car, probably because he had no childcare and had to be driving around delivering packages. What are your thoughts? I think that it really, really puts it all in such incredible high relief. And it’s incredible to have one class of people who are cosseted safe in their homes, trying to stay healthy and thinking about how they’re going to get the best Romano cheese, the best whole milk ricotta for their dinner that night, and are concentrated on food and wine, and then people who are just risking their lives every day.

frank bruni

Well, you asked me what my thoughts are in this, how this plays out. We talked about this some on the last episode of “The Argument,” but I don’t see a way in which this doesn’t bolster the appetite for a more generous social safety net. In comparison with many Western countries, our social safety net is not so sturdy. And I think the political receptiveness to doing something about that has got to increase. There’s just no way that won’t happen. I worry in the short-term. I see a lot of signs of anger out there. Anger well beyond the protests in Michigan, which are of a particular partisan nature. But I see a lot of anger out there at the issue we’ve been talking about for years, income inequality. That for some people, perhaps it’s been a little bit abstract — not for most people. I don’t think it’s remotely abstract for anyone anymore. And I think that is going to infuse and effect our politics in a very, very direct way. Exactly what happens, I don’t know. But you mentioned childcare, for example. I think what Elizabeth Warren was talking about in terms of much greater government assistance with childcare. I think that’s going to fall on much more receptive ears, because right now, across many classes, in fact, you have parents appreciating what it means to have children underfoot all the time, and how that complicates the work situation. I think you’re in that very circumstance yourself, Ginia.

ginia bellafante

Yeah. And I feel very, very lucky. I have a job. My husband has a job. We have a nice safe place to be during all this. But it is really hard to be administering — under the best, best, best circumstances, administering to a child doing online school — I have a 10-year-old boy — and then have the day end at 2:45 because there’s no supplemental childcare. And to be balancing that, and work, and your anxiety, and the child’s anxiety is a hard thing. So you have to imagine what it’s like for parents without those resources. A lot of people — a lot of sociologists, economists — are saying, well, is this really the moment where we are going to have an opportunity to rebuild so many things that are wrong with our society? Again, as you say, the opportunity to have people work from home and children learning online is going to make us question a lot of how we do the most fundamental things in our lives. [MUSIC PLAYING]

frank bruni

We’ll be right back. Now, I want to come back to New York City, since that’s what your column focuses on. And we talked a bit earlier about whether this pandemic and the aftermath of it, would the city be grittier, or would it in fact be more uniformly gilded? But there’s a whole other scenario that a lot of journalism is painting, which is that cities on the whole — and New York City is one example — are going to wither. That they’re going to become, if not ghost towns, they’re going to become shadows of their former selves. And in fact, The Times just on Monday published a business story by J. David Goodman with this headline, which is a quote from someone in the story. “I Don’t Think the New York That We Left Will Be Back for Some Years.” And in the story, he noted this. “Half of the hotels in the city are not operating. And with no reliable forecasts for when tourists might return, many may stay shut. Nearly the same portion of the city’s smallest businesses — some 186,000 shops employing fewer than 10 people — could fail. Replacing them could take years.” And he didn’t even mention restaurants, which of course, are near and dear to your and my heart because we’re big patrons of them. I used to be the restaurant critic of The Times. You used to be a guest at my table quite frequently. Do you think that cities on the whole, across the board, could end up devastated for quite some time by this, and see population retreat?

ginia bellafante

Well, for one thing — again, I am of two minds, and I’m going to give you each of those minds right now, share each of my minds. But we were seeing already, before this, an exodus from certain — what economists like Richard Florida call the superstar cities, where rents are just so exorbitant. Where the cost of owning a house is so prohibitive. We’re talking about San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston. That flight is likely to continue with fewer economic opportunities. It is likely to dissuade young people out of college from moving to those places, because there are so few opportunities. So we have — that already was happening. And this is certainly in the short-term, and I would say over the next few years, going to exacerbate that. After any crisis, financial crisis, Sandy, there are lots of think pieces telling us that urbanism is over, density is terrible — especially in this case. We have to remember what happened to New York City after 9/11. We had fear, tremendous job loss. Ultimately, the city came back in terms of the economy and prospered monumentally, almost unimaginably. Great increase in jobs, great increase in creative class jobs. We had a tech boom, and New York became its own tech center. And we had probably the biggest — surely the biggest escalation in real estate price in the city’s modern history. So you really had New York became the superstar city in those years after 9/11.

frank bruni

But was that, in some measure, in response to 9/11? Or was that despite 9/11? Or did 9/11 in fact have nothing to do with what was maybe a trajectory going on anyway?

ginia bellafante

I mean, I think initially, there was a lot of “you can’t let the terrorists win” ideology, and we’re going to fight harder, and shop harder. Remember Giuliani after 9/11, it was like, go back — start shopping. Go back to the stores. Let’s get the consumer economy going. So I think there was a lot of that. But then I also think that Mike Bloomberg came in and really had this vision of New York as a luxury product, as a place that was going to draw the international elite, of a city — and you’ve written about this more beautifully than anyone, about the public space. The incredible impact and renovation of park land in New York. And it became a more beautiful city, a more inviting city in many ways. Tourism up, up, up, up, up, up, up. Huge driver of the economy. And of course, the downside to that is that we started to see also serious inequality and homelessness.

frank bruni

But here’s the rub. We absolutely made big adjustments in the way we live after 9/11. The sorts of security lines, and the number of places that had security lines. That was a new phenomenon. At the scale it is now, it was a new phenomenon after 9/11. But it didn’t directly affect the way businesses operated in the fashion that social distancing, and whatever the next chapter of social distancing is, will. If restaurants are allowed to start coming back, but only at 30%, or only at 50 percent capacity, are they going to even be able to come back when they were operating on fairly thin profit margins already? Same thing for the small shop that’s not part of a chain. And one of the scenarios that’s been described that chills me is that we’ll be looking at a cityscape that is just all chain.

ginia bellafante

Right. And that — of course, the city was already besieged by the chain, so to speak. It was already so hard for small businesses to stay afloat. And this certainly seems as though it is the final nail in the coffin of the mom-and-pop shops, your favorite pet store guy. How do those people sustain themselves unless they own the building? That’s always the secret rub to how anybody stays for years and years, is that they’re not subject to these crazy escalating rents. If we’re going to see reduced rents commercially and residentially, will there be opportunities for that culture to come back and thrive five, six years from now, let’s say.

frank bruni

Ginia, I mentioned before that part of our long friendship has been set in restaurants.

ginia bellafante

Yes.

frank bruni

Do you miss restaurants right now as much as I do?

ginia bellafante

I miss them so much. And I miss — what I wouldn’t give now to go to a restaurant with no reservations, which always drove me nuts, and stand in a crowded bar for an hour and a half until I got my table. I mean, my god. My kingdom for a long wait at the bar. [CHUCKLING] You know, yeah, terribly. It was such a huge part of my own social life, your social life, and the life of New York City. And as we were talking about recently, you and I, we’re both real social creatures. And because of the way New York is, and the small spaces people live in, really major moments of our lives take place in restaurants. I don’t know where those spaces — what sociologists call third spaces, spaces that are not work or home that are so important. What’s going to take that place? I’m not down with the Zoom cocktail. I love you. I’m not having a Zoom cocktail with you.

frank bruni

I’ve been trying the Zoom cocktail route, and it really just doesn’t work for me. But no, I mentioned restaurants because they are such singular environments. They’re theaters of large celebration, and they’re theaters of small intimacies. And I mentioned them not in some privileged sense, but restaurants as an example of and a metaphor for public places where we can exchange smiles with strangers, exchange handshakes with people we’re meeting for the first time. I think about that lovely moment when you walk up to a bar, and— yes, right now, it feels even better if it’s a crowded bar, and I had to really shimmy my way through a scrum of people. And you place your order, and you have that first interaction with a bartender, and you’ve never met him or her before. And maybe you trade witticisms. Maybe you trade courtesies. Again, there’s a smile that goes both ways. And it’s such a tiny thing that kind of greases the wheels of existence and kind of blunts the edges of a day. And that and so many moments like that are gone right now. And I don’t know about you, but I feel like they’ve bled some of the color of life in a way that just feels awful.

ginia bellafante

Absolutely. It is— the monotony of each day with no special treat like that at the end— didn’t you sometimes wake up in the morning, feel a little disoriented, and then think, oh, I’ve got so much work to do, and then you remember the plan you have right for meeting a friend at dinner, and you’re suddenly jump out of bed and get animated. That happens to me — well it did happen to me.

frank bruni

Yeah. It was the light at the end of the tunnel. It was the pot of gold at the other side of the rainbow.

ginia bellafante

The light at the end of the tunnel, yeah. And that has been taken away from us.

frank bruni

We talked for a while about some of the big strokes of changes, big themes, and some of the trend lines that we’re worried about, or that we’re seeing. I want to talk about smaller moments. You are someone who keeps a very close eye on New York City. I know you have a huge network of fans and readers who email you observations, tell you about things they’ve seen. Are there some small moments since this pandemic hit that have been particularly moving to you?

ginia bellafante

Yes, absolutely. Many, many. And I would say one of the most thoughtful comments from a friend who had left the city and gone to the mountains, she was saying what she really missed about New York, what she was feeling ambivalent about— she was feeling ambivalent about the city before this happened— is the serendipitous encounters on the street. Density gives you contact. And she said, I don’t miss the three weeks of texting back and forth to plan dinner, but I miss just seeing you and our neighborhood friends — we are parents at the same school— just running into you in the morning, and maybe just going in to get a coffee quickly. I think that it shows us one of the most beautiful aspects of living in New York is the chance encounter. It’s those kind of things that people are realizing they miss, and they’re realizing, that’s why I live in New York. It’s not because of Per Se. I don’t go to Per Se. How often do I really go to the Met? When was the last time? But it’s that. It’s the human capital. I think the mythology of New York, its long history of being one of the most interesting cities in the world, no matter what, it’s always going to attract ambitious, creative, super fascinating people. That’s not going to change. It’ll take time to come back, but that won’t change. And the other thing is we are seeing how much cleaner and fresher the city feels with less car traffic, obviously. I think there are going to be new ways we think about the city’s public spaces, and just car travel. And I think we’re going to rethink that. [MUSIC PLAYING]

frank bruni

Ginia, before I let you go — and of course, I would like to never let you go — we’d all like to hear a recommendation from you. Usually, at the end of each podcast, one of our hosts recommends something to help take our mind off the news. But I understand that you want to direct us to a book that you once showcased in the Big City Book Club that you ran for several years, a New York-focused novel that has bearing on this moment?

ginia bellafante

Yeah. And I’ve been thinking about it again, because the novelist is the son of the bartender we were referencing earlier who died of COVID recently. It’s a novel called “Small Mercies.” The novelist is Eddie Joyce, and it’s a beautiful sprawling family saga about a family in Staten Island in the aftermath of 9/11, and it’s about the reverberations of death and crisis.

frank bruni

And if I read this right now, would it make me feel better about what we’re going through and what might be on the far side?

ginia bellafante

I think that it shows us that there is redemption in all this complexity, that we are loyal to the ones we love, and that New York is really a magical place, ultimately.

frank bruni

Ginia, thank you so, so much.

ginia bellafante

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

frank bruni