The importance of the election can be felt on the streets of New York

Taking a walk down to Times Square at the weekend, there was a palpable tension and unease in the air, writes Holly Baxter

An early voter wears a sticker after casting a ballot at Madison Square Garden (Getty)

As coronavirus cases skyrocket across the US, we’re sitting in a relative enclave of safety in New York City (something that would have been unthinkable to say back in April or May). While lockdowns are being recommended in the rural states that thus far have resisted business closures and mask-wearing, the five boroughs of NYC continue to plug on in “phase four” – the final phase of getting back to normality.

That doesn’t mean things here are remotely normal by the standards of anything other than 2020. I still haven’t gone inside any structure that isn’t my own apartment building in over six months, with outdoor dining still de rigueur – even though, technically, indoor dining at 25 per cent capacity opened up recently. So cautious are New Yorkers about going indoors after so long outside, that businesses like the one I had brunch at on the Upper West Side of Manhattan a couple of days ago are doing a roaring trade in heated plastic “bubbles”, which line the sidewalk and zip the inhabitants into a transparent, table-sized dome.

The atmosphere was oddly charged for a Sunday afternoon during the pandemic

As my brunching friend and I chowed down on our eggs Benedict in our bubble, we talked about the looming election and the strange experience of watching it unfold as immigrants. Saturday was the first day on which New York allowed early voting — and the first time the state has ever done so during a presidential election. Across the street, a long line of people snaked around the block, following “Vote Here” signs posted on walls and windows. The line was slow-going and the day was grey and chilly, but plenty of people kept turning up and then spilling into the same brunch place we were at, most of them covered in red, white and blue “I Voted” stickers.

We took a post-brunch walk through the Upper West Side and down to Times Square, taking in the strange sights of the tourist traps during a pandemic. It wasn’t as empty as it was a few weeks ago — the man who plays guitar in a pair of Y-fronts and a stars and stripes hat had returned, and the diner where everyone who works the shift as a moonlighting Broadway actor had opened up again too — but it was still changed. The still-closed cinema was advertising movies “coming up in March 2020” on its billboards outside. The offices that surround the area were closed down, and clearly had been for a while. 

And in place of the usually prominent advertising banners – which in a normal year blast admonitions to buy Coca-Cola, check out H&M’s fall collection, or visit Bloomingdale’s – were two new and controversial additions: one billboard showing Ivanka Trump, with a running tally beside her of how many Americans have died of the coronavirus, and another showing Jared Kushner, which quoted him saying in a controversial Vanity Fair interview: “[New Yorkers] are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” Both of them were paid for by the Republican, anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project (who responded to legal threats by the Trumps over the signs by writing on Twitter that they were not “scared” of the family, who are “not just Upper East Side socialites any more”).

As I stopped to take a picture of the billboards for posterity’s sake, I accidentally walked between a large group of police and a similarly sized group of teens who were shouting “pigs” and “class traitors” at them. The atmosphere was oddly charged for a Sunday afternoon during the pandemic, and even the attire of the people present was enough to show the divide in American society right now: one of the young people was wearing a face mask that had “Black Lives Matter” emblazoned on it, whereas one of the cops was wearing one that said “Thin Blue Line”. The groups eventually dissipated, but the general feeling of unease didn’t.

The coming couple of weeks will be some of the most important in America’s history. And walking the streets of New York City, you really do feel it.