#SUSHI YASU FOREST HILLS FOR FREE#

Here, we have devoted the magazine’s annual “Reasons to Love New York” issue to a celebration of the go-tos that have closed since the pandemic struck. This year more than ever, New York and the dreams of New Yorkers have been put on hold, which is an unnatural thing for such a restless place. “What is grief for a grocery store?” Emma Straub asks, recalling Red Hook’s short-lived Fairway.

It is difficult to locate the right perspective from which to mourn the death of a favorite business when we are also surrounded by sickness and death.

What is this city if so many of its establishments disappear permanently and at once? What does it mean for a city’s collective consciousness to lose an entire urban ecology, its landscape of cultural references, memories, longings, and aspirations? And what does it mean for the next Jake Shears to not be able to get that waiting (or go-go dancing) gig while he’s waiting to become famous? Even the dry cleaners are struggling to survive (who needs to do dry cleaning these days?). The free-spending tourist throngs that made everything so unpleasantly crowded are not expected back anytime soon. The city’s theaters and dance clubs are closed, and its restaurants, gyms, bars, and museums are running at precarious reduced capacity. The Partnership for New York City estimates that roughly one-third of the city’s 240,000 small businesses may never make it to the post-vaccine promised land. In some sense, this city is a ghost town, and we are its ghosts.īut what if this change happens all at once, like when that asteroid hit the Yucatán 66 million years back, chilling the atmosphere just enough to set in motion a cascade of effects that wiped out an entire dense ecosystem? The vertiginous churn this city is experiencing right now is so destructive, so widespread, so implacable that it is - like so many things in 2020 - describable only as unprecedented.

And then there are those long-shut spots where I was a regular, where someone now famous used to be my server: Amy Sedaris at Marion’s Jake Shears at Leshko’s Laverne Cox at Lucky Cheng’s.

#SUSHI YASU FOREST HILLS FOR FREE#

Gone long before the pandemic: the bar where I had my birthday two years in a row, the crêperie on Avenue B where I would eat for free back when I was broke because its owner had a crush on me, almost all of the places where my friends in bands gigged, back when I had lots of friends in bands, the coffee shop where I whiled away a period of unemployment, the yoga studio I used to go to with an ex that I lost in the breakup, the place where I bought that leather jacket that someone stole at a party. Marks Place in the East Village - the city has become less raggedy, more gentrified in more further-out places, more of a safe and prosperous customer-service lifestyle state. Every year I’ve lived here - for a while on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, when the Atlantic Center Mall was just a gash in the ground, but for many years now on St.

Sushi yasu forest hills