Just over a year ago, before the modern plague descended, Manhattan's Hudson Yards threw a launch party that was Versailles-like in its overabundance of champagne, oysters, top chefs, beautiful people and other trappings of a great city. 

But on a recent afternoon, Hudson Yards was a ghost town. Its 1m-square-foot shopping mall was shuttered and its anchor tenant, Neiman Marcus, would soon declare bankruptcy. The Vessel public art sculpture — likened by one reviewer to a giant doner kebab, and usually teeming with tourists — was empty but for a security guard patrolling its base.

The only foot traffic was a steady stream of soldiers, who had been treating Covid-19 patients at the hastily-erected field hospital at the nearby Javits convention centre. They were lined up, at six-foot intervals, to collect free meals at a Hudson Yards storefront that had been converted into a soup kitchen. Alongside them were delivery drivers, postal workers, office cleaners and others manning the frontlines in New York City’s struggle against coronavirus.