By Dan Fox
Perspectives can change fast. My working week on Monday 29 October began answering emails and editing an article for this magazine. The morning was unusual only in that I was working from home, rather than the Frieze New York office on Union Square. I was waiting like everyone else in the city for Hurricane Sandy to arrive later that day. My week ended working as a volunteer unloading and distributing food and water from FEMA trucks in my neighbourbood on the Lower East Side, an area that had been without power since Monday night, when the electricity substation at East 14th Street was flooded during the storm surge – a momentary blue flash in the sky around 8:30pm then blackout.
Between Monday and late Friday evening, with power beginning to be restored to parts of Lower Manhattan, I’ve lived in a city bisected by electricity; the power-haves and the power-have-nots. In upper Manhattan (everywhere north of 38th Street) and inland areas of Brooklyn, it was as if nothing happened. Bars were hopping, and people were shopping. Minor signs that something wasn’t right could be detected: certain uptown hotels locked their doors to anyone who wasn’t a guest but just wanted somewhere to charge up a phone and let relatives know they were OK. Brooklynites sheltered friends who had trekked across the East River bridges in search of hot water and a phone signal. Lower Manhattan might as well have been a different city. Restaurants gave away free food because they couldn’t refrigerate it, and total strangers chatted in the streets, comparing rumours about when the lights might come back on. There was no subway. The zone became a cash economy as no ATMs or credit card machines worked. Some businesses and institutions offered free phone recharging stations, although phone reception was spotty or non-existent south of 18th Street. Fights broke out over payphones. People used fire hydrants to wash clothes. At night the streets were eerily dark, with residents walking around with flashlights, stepping over fallen trees and branches. As the week wore on, food distribution points began to spring up. Hundreds mustered themselves to volunteer and help. The National Guard could be seen on my street. Lack of steam and electricity meant water couldn’t be pumped to upper floors of high-rises and projects, and many vulnerable people were stranded without heat, food, water or access in and out of their homes. The borough of Staten Island, and areas of Brooklyn and Queens such as Red Hook, Breezy Point and Coney Island have been devastated. So too parts of New Jersey, pummelled as the storm hit land. There are fuel shortages, and hospitals in afflicted areas have been struggling to care for patients. At time of writing, the number of deaths from Sandy is reportedly 41 in New York – almost half in Staten Island – and pushing 100 across the northeastern United States, with 67 in the Caribbean.
Our art community has been hit badly by the storm. Many galleries in Chelsea suffered flood damage as the storm surge pushed water from the Hudson River into the streets between 10th and 11th Avenues, flooding street level spaces and basements. Artists have lost work – not just those with work in storage at their galleries in Chelsea, but those whose homes and studios elsewhere were flooded – and gallery buildings and equipment have been wrecked. Many will struggle to get back on their feet. (For an in-depth look at the situation in Chelsea, Linda Yablonksy’s report over at Artforum.com and Jerry Saltz at vulture.com are recommended reading.) The severity of Sandy’s impact on the New York art scene in the long-term remains to be seen but the heartfelt sympathy and thoughts of everyone at Frieze are with all our friends and colleagues who have been affected.
Perspectives and priorities can change fast. You can be fully connected one second, living in the dark the next. Just over an hour ago, whilst writing this, the power returned to my little corner of Manhattan. People in the street clapped and cheered. For some, life returns to normal. For others, it will take longer. For all of us here, storms such as Sandy may become a regular and dangerous fact of life; as the environmentalist Robert Watson once put it, ‘Mother Nature always bats last.’
E.B. White, in his famous 1949 essay ‘Here is New York’ likened the city to ‘a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it.’ And that’s what we have to remember. This is a resilient city. This is New York.