In her latest piece for Vanity Fair, renowned journalist Marie Brenner draws parallels between New York City in the Great Depression and now during the COVID-19 Crisis. Most stark is a discovery Brenner stumbles upon during an evening jog: the conversion of Central Park’s Great Lawn into spillover medical treatment tents for COVID patients. The emergence of these tents evokes a sharp comparison with how the lawn was similarly dotted by tents as it became a Hooverville during the devastating downturn of the 1930s.
The comparisons don’t end there:
“I see New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, and in his cadence, I hear a voice from the 1930s. ‘Forget the politics, we have a national crisis,’ he says. ‘We are not red, we are not blue, we are red, white, and blue.’ I see Cuomo, and I imagine an F.D.R. of this moment, a New Yorker who is steering America through a crisis without apparent end.”
Brenner’s “lockdown letter” paints a poignant personal and political picture of the uncertain times we are living through.
Read Marie’s full article here
