← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
Celebrating New York's Covid Essential Workers Five Years On
00:29:07
Manhattan borough historian Robert W. Snyder discusses his new book, 'When the City Stopped: Stories from New York's Essential Workers.'
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- [00:00]
Robert Snyder
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- [00:36]
Alison Stewart
This is all of it. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in soho. Thank you for spending time with me. Here's what we've got coming up on the show today. Trans influencer and activist Dylan Mulvaney first gained fame documenting her transition on TikTok. She'll be with us to talk about her new memoir, Paper Doll Notes from a Late Bloomer. Actor Jason Isaacs joins us to talk about season of HBO's White Lotus and later, Hans Zimmer, the composer behind Dune, Gladiator, Inception and countless other films. He will be here to discuss his new concert documentary, Hans Zimmer and A Diamond in the Desert. That's the plan. So let's get this started with some gratitude for the essential workers who helped us get through the early days of COVID That was a sound that became familiar every night in 2020, the way new Yorkers said thank you to the essential workers. This week marks the fifth anniversary of when the World Health Organization declared a COVID 19 pandemic. And all week we've been reflecting about how it shaped our lives. To wrap up, we're talking about the people who made huge, huge sacrifices. Essential Workers. Manhattan Bureau historian Robert Snyder's latest book is titled when the World Stories from Essential Workers. It's filled with first hand accounts of workers who had to leave their homes and go to work while the virus was spreading. It included health care workers such as doctors, nurses and paramedics who are on the front lines. But it also includes MTA transit workers, delivery workers and cashiers at the grocery store. When the World Stopped is out tomorrow. Joining us now to discuss is author and Manhattan Borough historian Robert Schneider, who is also professor emeritus at American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers University. Nice to meet you.
- [02:40]
Robert Snyder
Great to meet you too, listeners.
- [02:42]
Alison Stewart
We'd like to get you in on this conversation. 1. Were you an essential worker? Was someone in your family an essential worker? What precautions did you have to take at home to prevent the spread of the virus? And if you were an essential worker, how did it feel to go to work? Work each day? Our Phone lines are 212-433-969-2212-4433 wnyc you can call in, you can join us on air, or you can send us a text to that number or hit us up on social media at all of it. Wnyc. There are so many stories in your book, throughout the entirety of your book. It's been five years since the pandemic began. Was there a common sentiment or a theme that you heard throughout the interviews in this book?
- [03:27]
Robert Snyder
One thing that ran through all the interviews was a combination of anger at how New York City had been abandoned in the early days of the pandemic. People were furious at that, but also a desire to see a better city on the other side of the pandemic. People would say again and again, we're suffering right now, but this has gotta be to some purpose in the future. Things have to be made better.
- [03:50]
Alison Stewart
How many interviews are in the book?
- [03:53]
Robert Snyder
There are about 60 photographs, interviews and first person narratives in the book altogether. About two thirds of those are interviews and first person narratives that I collected and historians and folklorists all around New York City collected during the days of the pandemic.
- [04:11]
Alison Stewart
How does it present a diverse account of what happened during those days?
- [04:16]
Robert Snyder
When I was trying to figure out which interviews to include, I focused on people who are essential workers and people who had multiple layers of experience in the pandemic. For example, I'm thinking of one woman who was a bus driver. Her name's Reagan Wheel. She was a bus driver. She's an African American. She's a woman. She comes from a family of transit workers. She brought a lot of experiences to her job. I'm thinking of an emt, Phil Suarez, who was working on an ambulance, but he's also an immigrant and he had a sympathy for immigrants and he was also a mountaineer, so he knew how to cope with danger and risks.
- [04:54]
Alison Stewart
Why did you feel it was necessary five years in to gather these stories? You could have gathered them one year in, or you could have waited till 10 years later.
- [05:04]
Robert Snyder
A lot of the interviews were conducted in the first year of the pandemic. A few of them stretched out longer. I don't think anybody expected the pandemic to last as long as it did. So. There were initial interviews conducted in 2020 and more that went on down as late as 2023, maybe even 2024. When I sat down to make selections, I chose some interviews that reflected intensely one moment, like the worst days of the pandemic and other interviews that allowed us to see how one person coped with different stages of the unfolding pandemic.
- [05:39]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk To Kay, who is calling in from the Bronx. Hi, Kay, thank you so much for calling all of it. You're on the air.
- [05:48]
Kay
You're very welcome. Yeah, as I'm, I'm listening to this.
- [05:51]
Jack
And I'm thinking no one says anything about sanitation workers.
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Kay
I used to be a sanitation worker. Unfortunately, I got laid off because I refused to vaccine. But hopefully, if the case, they still.
- [06:05]
Jack
Have a case going on. So hopefully if I win, I'll go.
- [06:08]
Kay
Back and get my back paid.
- [06:09]
Jack
But the fact is, everyone else has.
- [06:11]
Kay
Been mentioned, you know, police department, ems, everybody else. But you rarely hear anything about New York City Sanitation Department.
- [06:20]
Jack
And I'm wondering why is that?
- [06:22]
Robert Snyder
I agree with you. Sanitation workers are ignored and overlooked. They're even more overlooked than transit workers. And transit workers are plenty overlooked. I worked with interviews conducted by a variety of universities and a library, the Queens Public Library. I don't remember a single interview with a sanitation worker being in there. But there are also no interviews with transit workers or police officers or firefighters. So I had to cover a lot of gaps. The, the book is not a perfect microcosm of the city, but I think transit workers and sanitation workers both need to be here more and heard more.
- [06:54]
Alison Stewart
What are some things from the early days of the pandemic and quarantine that you think people are starting to forget?
- [07:03]
Robert Snyder
I think people are starting to forget how terrifying it was. They want to forget that people were dying. The number of deaths went up dramatically every day. And. And they want to forget that. They want to put that behind themselves, and that's very human. But if they put that behind themselves, they forget the lesson we need to remember, which is that it was essential workers like sanitation workers, transit workers, police officers, doctors, nurses, and other folks who went out and worked and saved the city. We need to remember their labor because they set an example of working for the common good that we're going to need in the future if we're going to get through other health emergencies.
- [07:42]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Jack from Kearney, New Jersey. Hi, Jack. Thank you so much for taking the time. Time to call today.
- [07:50]
Kay
Yes, thank you. I listen to the show every day.
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Alison Stewart
So glad to hear it.
- [07:55]
Kay
And the reason I'm. The reason I'm calling is I was a vessel traffic safety specialist in training for the Coast Guard. At the time, I was in my 60s. And what was scary was we work in a windowless building and it's you working almost like an air traffic controller in a control tower. You're doing maritime traffic in, in and out of New York harbor, coordinating what they're going to see, the inbound ship or the outbound ship. But was the problem was that people were only six feet apart and people were getting sick and we didn't know what this was. But the Coast Guard had, you know, had a soldier on because, you know, it's an essential, it's an essential service. So and the same thing right next to us is, is the rescue coordination center for the whole east coast of the United States, RCC New York on Staten Island. And at that time, people were dying in Staten Island Hospital, put in body bags into freezers, which was pretty scary.
- [08:56]
Alison Stewart
Very scary. Thank you so much for calling, Jack. That's interesting. It's the early days. People just didn't really understand what was happening.
- [09:04]
Robert Snyder
Truthfully, nobody expected the pandemic to be as fierce or as long lasting as it was, even though all you had to do was look at Italy to see that there was a terrible death toll there. I have one entry in the of a man writing about emailing with his relatives in Italy, seeing terrible loss of life in Italy. But somehow New Yorkers believed that we would pass this. I was at crowded parties the week before we went into lockdown.
- [09:27]
Alison Stewart
Yeah. You have this one quote from Governor Andrew Cuomo. He appeared in Manhattan with Bill de Blasio March 2, 2020. He said, we have the best healthcare system in the world here. What happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don't think it's going to be as bad as it was in other countries. How did New York State and New York City leadership initially respond to the threat of the virus?
- [09:51]
Robert Snyder
They were too slow in retrospect. The virus was circulating all around the city and the state while the mayor and the governor were dithering in their usual fight for dominance and it delayed us. They didn't listen enough to their public health professionals early on when it might have made a big difference.
- [10:09]
Alison Stewart
We're looking back at five years of COVID this week. Today we're discussing with Manhattan borough historian Robert Snyder. His new book is called when the City Stopped Stories from New York's Essential Workers. It is out tomorrow. Listeners get in on the conversation. Were you an essential worker? Was someone in your family an essential worker? What precautions do you take at home to prevent the spread of the virus? And if you were an essential worker, how does it feel to go to work every day? The number is 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. You can call in, you can join us on air. You can text to us at that number. You can also reach out on social media of it wnyc. We met sanitation worker about the people who we don't necessarily think of as essential workers. Who else is in that list?
- [10:58]
Robert Snyder
What happened in Covid is that certain occupations were declared essential. We decided to keep supermarkets open. We decided to keep drugstores open. So workers who worked behind checkout counters in drugstores or in supermarkets suddenly found themselves going to work in the middle of the pandemic and facing mortal danger. They had never expected that before. Police officers, firefighters, they expect to face danger on job. It's part of their training. They learn to cope with it. But suddenly cashiers found out that they could die on the job. And I think it was terrifying for them. And I think their insistence on coming to work in those circumstances was heroic.
- [11:36]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, we got this one from Fareed. He said, I think many undocumented people played very essential roles during the pandemic in jobs like food preparation and delivery, warehouses and restaurants. Tremendous help for a city like New York.
- [11:50]
Robert Snyder
We have an interview in the book with a food delivery worker whose job is hard in the worst of circumstances. But when delivering food to a house or an apartment carries the risk of infection, it becomes much more dangerous. He's already worried about getting hit by cars while he's out on his bicycle making a delivery. Suddenly he has to face the challenge of getting sick when he makes a drop off and then worse, maybe bringing the disease home to infect his family because he lives in an overcrowded apartment. Because that's the way to SA on rent.
- [12:22]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Lisa who's calling in from Monroe, New York. Hi, Lisa, thank you so much for making the time to call us on all of it. You're on the air.
- [12:30]
Lisa
Hi, how are you?
- [12:32]
Alison Stewart
Good, thank you.
- [12:35]
Lisa
Yeah, just, just to kind of piggyback on the previous caller and also to tie in people forgetting how scary it was during that time. I am a veterinary technician in my hospital. I work at an emergency and specialty hospital. So much like human hospitals were open 247 and all the general practices were closed. So we were seeing an overload of pets coming in. And it was scary for owners because they could not come in with their pets. We also had to figure out ways for owners to be present if they had to make the decision to euthanize their ill pet because some places were not allowing owners to be present with their pet, which. Which is upsetting, rightfully so. And I think that's forgotten of how people couldn't be present with their animals and didn't know what was going on, couldn't even meet their doctor, the doctor that's treating them face to face. But certainly was scary for all of us and caused a lot of anger. Anger. And we were all scared, too. But we still had a job to do, which we did, like everyone else.
- [13:46]
Alison Stewart
We appreciate that. Lisa, thank you for calling in. This says I was contacted in June 2020 to work as a temp contract at Quest Diagnostics for COVID 19 testing. The frustrating aspect of that job was that we weren't tested for the virus, even though at least 15 people got sick with COVID I guess we thought were thought of as expendables. Did people say that to you, that they thought they were expendable?
- [14:12]
Robert Snyder
There were times when people thought that they were being asked to work in very dangerous circumstances, and they were. And there were times, yes, when they felt like they were being treated as if they were expendable. Nobody knew how infectious it was. We just knew it was deadly. And people were still asked to go to work all the same in conditions that were often very dangerous themselves, crowded with inadequate ppe, with no adequate masking really, to protect you. So, yes, the heroism of essential workers should not obscure the fact that they worked often under terribly unequal conditions that made life dangerous for them.
- [14:49]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Lee, who's calling in from the East Village, I believe is a physician. Physician. Hello, Lee, thank you so much for calling in.
- [14:58]
Lee
Hi, good afternoon. Yes, I am a physician. I worked in a hospital which, with all due respect, I prefer not to mention. But it was devastating for me. I can honestly say that I had a list of maybe 100 patients, and every day 20 to 50% of the names were different. My job was to keep the patients on sedation. So as they entered from this world to the next, they did it in comfort. And I regard that to be a very, you know, very rewarding thing for me. It sounds strange, but I think that act of kindness meant a lot in my career and my profession. I was juxtaposing that, though, with the frustration that I felt when I drove from the hospital with people that refused to mask up, that refused to do things that were really to their benefit and that perpetuated the pandemic and ultimately contributed in some way to those patients that died. And to this day, it still bothers me.
- [16:01]
Alison Stewart
Lee, thank you so much for sharing your experience. And we appreciate all the work that you did.
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Robert Snyder
This gulf between frontline workers and essential workers and the rest of us is one of the reasons I edited this book. There were so many reasons, different ways to experience the pandemic differently. That one person's experience, like a doctor's or a nurse's in a hospital is very different from somebody who stayed at home and went to their country place. And I want people in those different walks of life to understand what it was like to go through the pandemic so that maybe someday in the future we can forge a common response to the next health emergency.
- [16:38]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Manhattan borough historian Robert Schneider. The new book is called when the City Stories from New York's Essential Workers. We'll have more after a quick break. This is all of it. You are listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest in studio is Robert Snyder. He's written a book called when the City Stopped. Stories from New York's Essential Workers were taking your calls as well. I did want to ask you a question. How did the people in this book that you've interviewed, how did they collectively process the immense scale of loss during.
- [17:23]
Robert Snyder
The time the big gulf in the pandemic One of the big gulfs in the pandemic was the gulf between the enormous number of deaths and how privately they were experienced. Funerals were very small affairs, if at all. And the phrase that people used again and again for those who went into the hospital, as you go into the hospital, you die alone. Nurses often held up phones so people could hear the voices of their loved ones in their last minutes. But it was very hard to process the scale of death. And for essential workers, it was very difficult to hear people say in social media, online that there was no big death toll, that this was all this was no worse than a cold. This made people furious, especially if they were working in hospitals.
- [18:10]
Alison Stewart
We recently talked to Carla Fernandez who wrote she co founded a national peer support group for people who have lost people, especially 21 to 45 year olds. And many cultures have long standing rituals, whether it be around wakes, around funerals, around other communal gatherings upon death. What impact do you think this had on our city's ability to move forward? The fact that we couldn't have these.
- [18:35]
Robert Snyder
Rituals, I think it perpetuates the trauma of the pandemic in many ways. You can't bring it to a close or you can't reduce its impact on you so that you can think straight about the next emergency. It's always there with you. It's weighing you down. And we need to learn from the pandemic for sure. But we also have to face the future, clearly.
- [18:55]
Alison Stewart
During the early days of the pandemic, WNYC staff worked around the clock to stay on the air. And that means engineers like our very own, all of it. Juliana Fonda left home every day to come into the studio, to the empty studio. Juliana joins me. You can join in on the conversation as well, Robert. Julianna, at what point did you realize things weren't going to return to normal?
- [19:18]
Juliana Fonda
I thought it was very strange at first because my boss, Aaron Cohen, was like, so would you be willing to live in a hotel for a while? And I was like, oh, this is serious. And we also got a letter from D.C. saying we could pass, you know, through any checkpoints. And that really, like, you know, landed it for me. And then after a couple weeks, we. I think we just knew that the city was empty.
- [19:48]
Alison Stewart
Juliana, to what extent did you think of your work as essential before the pandemic?
- [19:53]
Juliana Fonda
Not really. I didn't even think about it. It wasn't really part. It's just, this is my job. I come to work. But I didn't think, oh, people are relying on me. And then when I realized that there were other engineers who said, I'm not willing to live in a hotel. I'm not willing to come in every day, then I realized, oh, okay.
- [20:12]
Alison Stewart
How did the nature of your job change during the pandemic?
- [20:15]
Juliana Fonda
Well, as you well know, we did a lot of remote, so broadcasting. So you were at home. Brian Lehrer was at home. Our previous Morning Edition host, Richard Hake, was at home. And so we had to juggle directors on the phone and remote control. So, you know, just listening and trying to do Matt Mirando screen calls while he was running the board during your show. So there was a lot more juggling. And being alone in the studio was stressful.
- [20:47]
Alison Stewart
I was gonna say it was just you some days.
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Juliana Fonda
Oh, yeah, yeah.
- [20:50]
Alison Stewart
It was definitely in the whole studio. In the whole station.
- [20:53]
Juliana Fonda
Yes, absolutely. Except for, you know, a few engineers who would come in every day. And we had one broadcaster, Sean Carlson, who came in every day.
- [21:04]
Alison Stewart
Wow. The team was small and mighty. Anybody you want to shout out?
- [21:08]
Juliana Fonda
Can I shout out everyone?
- [21:09]
Alison Stewart
Yeah.
- [21:09]
Juliana Fonda
Okay. So in building operations, Jose Castillo, Brandon Kendell, Alethea John. Darnell Jefferson. In engineering, John Boianelli, Rich lamott, George Wellington, Chase Culpan, Alan Black, Jason Isaac, and. And the broadcast engineers were Matt Mirando, Leora Noam Kravitz, Milton Ruiz, Me, Jake Cowett, and Vince Fairchild. And our own Sean Carlson, the ATC host came in every morning with me to do Morning Edition.
- [21:39]
Alison Stewart
Juliana, thank you so much.
- [21:40]
Juliana Fonda
Thank you.
- [21:41]
Alison Stewart
It was worth it. It's really amazing when you hear back to that time, the idea of her sitting in the studio by herself, running everything all alone, and I'm in my basement with a microphone, trying to keep community with people in New York.
- [21:57]
Robert Snyder
Thanks for that collective shout out. And it brings up a really important point, was that in the worst days of the pandemic, everybody had to reinvent their job. That was especially true among doctors, nurses, and health researchers and hospitals. And one of the things that became clear to me as I was editing the book was that as awful as those times were, as painful as it was to read about the suffering of those times, the work of essential workers in that time was absolutely. They reinvented their jobs. They found new ways to treat patients. They found new ways to reinvent medical care from the bottom up. And that eased burdens and sometimes saved lives.
- [22:34]
Alison Stewart
Something interesting that came up in the book was the role of first responders, especially firefighters, who have been taking medical calls since 1995. How well positioned were firefighters in the.
- [22:47]
Robert Snyder
Early days of COVID It was very difficult. It was very dangerous for them to go in. They knew that sometimes people were first responders. I think of this among police officers as well. You know, were reluctant to wear masks. They had to figure out what the level of danger was. They had to figure out what they could be expected to do. But I have one interview in there with, you know, Richard Breyer, who is a precinct commander in the Bronx in the nypd, and he told his officers, this is as essential to our work as going in on a gun job. You talk an oath when you became a police officer to protect the public and face danger. And if Covid confronts us with danger, we've got to face it.
- [23:24]
Alison Stewart
One person you interviewed in the book reminded people like, this is bigger than 9 11.
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Robert Snyder
In the early days of the pandemic, I convened a group of historians, folklorists, and archivists to talk about what was going on. And we're searching for the metaphor, right? And one of us, Josh Brown, said, this is going to be as big as the Great Depression. Josh was right. It is certainly as big as the Great Depression and its impact compared to 9 11. A lot of people said that this Covid was worse in that it lasted longer and took more lives. And I think that's an important thing to remember.
- [24:01]
Alison Stewart
Let's talk to Mark calling in from Jackson Heights. Hi, Mark. Thank you so much for taking the time to call in today.
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Jack
Thank you very much for talking to me.
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Alison Stewart
Yeah, we'd love to hear your story.
- [24:13]
Jack
So I work in broadcast like your engineer, basically. As a matter of fact, I stepped into the shoes of people who had comorbidities and did not feel safe. And unlike your engineer, I was working shoulder to shoulder with another audio professional from day one. I could have worked two shifts a day. I could have worked seven days a week for the first 10 weeks. It was just insane how dire the need was. And discontinued throughout the company did some things to make accommodations. One of the things that struck me, not just in our world, but in other broadcast environments, was how many of the people on the air, whether they were zoom calls or the few people who came into the studio to be on camera, how many of them spoke of how much they appreciated the producers and everybody working from home. I never heard one of them point to the camera guy and say, thanks for being here. Yeah, here's the audio guy. Thanks for making sure that I'm heard every day. Thanks for making sure that when we do all this crazy zoom stuff, that we're able to talk to these people. And that struck me as some sort of disassociation from the reality of what was going on, that I was driving in city, I could park anywhere I wanted. I got pictures of Fifth Avenue that are absolutely empty at noon. And it felt totally crazy. But for some of us, it also felt the same way it felt when I was in Times Square when there was a bomb thing and we ran toward the bomb. We didn't run away. I ran into my studio in Times Square because that was my responsibility.
- [26:04]
Alison Stewart
Thank you so much for calling in, Mark. Let's talk to Sarah in Sussex County, New Jersey. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for calling, all of it.
- [26:12]
Sarah
Thanks for having me. Can you hear me okay?
- [26:14]
Alison Stewart
Yeah, you're on the air.
- [26:16]
Sarah
Great. So I'm a public health worker. I've worked in governmental public health for over a decade. I'm now at the state health department. But during COVID I was a local epidemiologist. And it's even hard for me to talk about it now without bursting into tears because our work is just so forgotten. We worked seven days a week, 24 7, trying to give out guidance as fast as we could when we weren't getting it from the federal level, counting people. I would get calls in the middle of the night from a nursing director at a nursing home that another patient had died, another patient had died, and it was our job to collect that information and try and help People make safe decisions for themselves and their families, and we never stopped. And, in fact, not only did we not really get recognized most of the time for that. And God bless our, you know, hospital workers and frontline healthcare providers. Their work deserves to be recognized. But we, what we did got us the opposite. We made enemies. Right. Because the super, you know, I had people accuse me of who's paying your paycheck? At a board of education meeting when we were saying, the school still has to remain closed, it's not safe for students to be there. Just in a way that I. My entire field is still dealing with the trauma from that in a way that's really pretty unbelievable. And we're back to sort of being behind the scenes again. And no one really knows what their local health department does for the most part, usually.
- [27:38]
Alison Stewart
Sarah, thank you so much for calling in. And I could hear the sort of. The emotion in her voice, couldn't you?
- [27:43]
Robert Snyder
Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that I've heard from other people who work in public health, a deep sense of frustration that they were ignored during the pandemic and vilified afterwards.
- [27:52]
Alison Stewart
The first vaccine was administered on December 14, 2020. What was that day like?
- [28:00]
Robert Snyder
It was the beginning of a shift in the nature of the pandemic. It took a while for most of us to get vaccines. In fact, my experience with the glitchy computer websites that you had to sign on at really challenged my trust in the people who put the system together. So it made me skeptical and dubious about the people who were in charge. But once the vaccines came in, they broke the back of the pandemic. It was no longer as deadly as it was in the spring of 20. And then the vaccines and the irritations of masking and social distancing became the big issue. And that's what people remember. Inconvenience, not the deadly days of the spring of 2020.
- [28:40]
Alison Stewart
If you're thinking about 2025, 2026, are we in a better situation? Are we prepared if something like this happens again?
- [28:50]
Robert Snyder
We can learn from the past if we ask the right questions. And I think the question to begin with is, how were the burdens of the pandemic distributed? And what motivated those essential workers who went out and set aside their own convenience to work for the rest of us? They had many motivations, from professionalism to loyalty to workmates, but the energy that they brought to their jobs saved the city from the bottom up.
- [29:13]
Alison Stewart
The name of the book is called when the City Stories from New York's Essential Workers. It will be released tomorrow. My guest has been Robert Schneider, Manhattan Borough Historian and Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journal at Rutgers. Thank you for joining us for taking our listeners calls. We really appreciate your time.
- [29:33]
Robert Snyder
Thank you.
- [29:36]
Jack
This is Ira Flato, host of Science Friday. For over 30 years, the science Friday team has been reporting high quality science and technology news, making science fun for curious people by covering everything from the outer reaches of space to the rapidly changing world of AI to the tiniest microbes in our bodies. Audiences trust our show because they know we're driven by a mission to inform and serve listeners first and foremost with important news they won't get anywhere else. And our sponsors benefit from that halo effect. For more information on becoming a sponsor, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.