Is it OK to go to the park during lockdown? It’s inevitable

With many public places forced to close in the Big Apple, Holly Baxter considers why time outdoors is crucial for the mind and body

Brooklyn’s Prospect Park was packed on Sunday (AP)

The coronapocalypse grinds on, and things are starting to get testy in our house. I say house, but it’s a studio flat, and we’re sharing it with our flatmate’s sickly cat while he self-quarantines following a trip to Mexico. Between cleaning up cat vomit, airing out the flat whenever Nelson uses the litter tray, and trying not to distract each other while we work from home, my fiance and I have also been trying – desperately – not to panic about our wedding later this year. So desperate are we to avoid this conversation topic that we have instead conversed about the following things:

• How best to build a Lego bridge that can hold more than 200 pounds
• Whether we could mathematically model “herd immunity” on Google Sheets (we could)
• What kind of start-up we would set up if we were given entrepreneurial funds or won the lottery
• Whether Freud’s theories are really obsolete or actually the building blocks of modern psychiatry
• Which decade it must have been scariest to live in
• How we might construct a Black Death-style doctor’s plague mask and whether it would be acceptable to take one on the subway
• Whether Reagan or Trump was more deluded about their own success
• Whether Americans would find Martin McDonagh​ plays funny
• Who would be in our zombie apocalypse team
• Whether we could live permanently on a boat stationed just offshore during the zombie apocalypse
• How tall a building we might have to build if we wanted to stay inside it while it withstood the piling on of 60 million zombies
• How we might go about constructing a post-apocalyptic underwater world

As you can see, most of these have an underlying theme, and that is the large-scale destruction of the human race. But there is also time for a bit of intellectual one-upmanship – and Lego.

The problem with living on lockdown in New York – which we are now, ever since governor ​Andrew Cuomo announced that all bars, restaurants and schools would be closed down, and all offices should empty out – is that the city has an entire housing market based around the principle that you will spend hardly any time indoors. People live in shoebox-sized, one-room apartments because there are so many bars to visit, so many cheap restaurants to frequent, and such beautiful weather to sit outside in from March until October. I’ve watched the lucky residents of the tall apartment block next to mine spend time in their fancy roof garden from my small nook at the top of a brownstone for the past couple days and wondered whether I should just scale the roof anyway for something to do. Thankfully, it hasn’t quite got to that.

The city has an entire housing market based around the principle that you will spend hardly any time indoors (EPA)

On Sunday, we decided to go to the local park for something to do with ourselves (we’d drained Netflix dry by then, and even FaceTimed with our friends who live across the street. We optimistically put on our gym clothes and promised each other we would do some sport, something to get our hearts pumping after a few consecutive days on the sofa. The park would be quiet, we reasoned, and we could zip round the running track then go home and make milkshakes from our emergency provisions.

We are not underprivileged New Yorkers; we’re just the normal ones, and we needed that break

We walked down deserted streets, chatting away happily in the spring sunshine to each other, and then entered into… chaos. The normally sedate park was packed with people, shoulder to shoulder. There were picnickers stationed at regular intervals across the large expanse of grass, as far as the eye could see. The woods were full of children, and the running tracks were packed with dog-walkers, socialising teenagers and parents with strollers. So this was where the whole of New York had got to.

We did a quick jog round the track (with lots of stops for various obstacles), keeping our distance as much as possible from the groups of people desperate for social contact. They were exiles from the closed museums, gym classes and brunch places. They knew not to gather indoors, but had all been advised that an outdoor session where nobody touched was still OK. And they had taken it to heart.

Leaving the house is inevitable. Catching coronavirus isn’t (Reuters) (REUTERS)

When we got home, I noticed “Prospect Park” was trending on Twitter; the whole of the United States was commenting on the situation. Someone had done the same trip as us and taken a picture of the packed-out scenes, and the images had gone viral. People from New Jersey and Philadelphia to California and Salt Lake City were weighing in on the “irresponsible Brooklyn hipsters about to get everyone killed”. There was real anger from people claiming that the selfishness of youngsters eating sandwiches in the sunlight would lead to the deaths of vulnerable people. Mainly, that anger came from people who live in areas with vast expanses of open greenery and large houses with gardens.

I wondered how many of them had ever lived in basement apartments with windows that let no light in, with two children and a partner. That is the situation for many people in Brooklyn, including the family who lives in the basement of our building.

Leaving the house is inevitable. Catching coronavirus isn’t. After a brief hour outside to air out our bodies and minds, my fiance and I returned to our own small flat to douse ourselves liberally in hand sanitiser and watch back episodes of The Masked Singer. We are not underprivileged New Yorkers; we’re just the normal ones, and we needed that break. We would stick our heads out the windows and begin a street-wide singalong a la Italy if we could – but alas, both of us were cursed with the singing voices of dying bats.