Portrait of a Lunch Hour in the Fi-Di
Tables at Zuccotti Park recommend one person sit at the tables at a time.
10 students in Professor Paul Glader’s Narrative Non-Fiction class reported during the 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. lunch hour in downtown Manhattan during a week in November 2020. Reporters on this story include :Hannah Gillian, Natalie Lowin, Misha Garza Lopez, Rachel Freeman, Serena Tuomi, Drew Richardson, Connor Brickel, Taylor Chick, Njeri McPherson, Abby Miller and Lauren Bannister. Edited by: Hannah Mallard and Paige Hagy. Photo Editing by: Brittany Bhulaai
It’s 70 degrees—almost too warm for midday November. A slight breeze whisks in from the East River but pedestrians barely need a sweater for a lunch outside in the sun.
With the cafeteria closed on the third floor of the 56 Broadway Building that The King’s College shares with the United Federation of Teachers, students, staff and faculty have to either pack a lunch when visiting campus or brave the outside world and navigate the Pandemic dynamics of closed businesses, social distancing and hyper sanitized environments as they locate lunch-time sustenance.
It’s a big change for members of the King’s community and office workers in lower Manhattan as the New York lunch-time ritual is saddled with new cautions (Mask up!) and limited by fewer options (closing early!).
Hunting, Gathering & Foraging in the Fidi
Some students at The King’s College say their lunch hour has largely remained unaffected by the Coronavirus. Rather, they are encouraged to explore more local options.
“My lunchtimes have been a lot more adventurous,” said junior Luke Gainey. “The idea of finding a park or fun place to sit after picking up food isn’t ideal, however, I have found a few places I really like to sit outside and now lunch is just as great as last year!”
Occupy Lunch in Zuccotti
Zuccotti Park is a lunch hub of the Financial District, sitting amid an assortment of restaurants and towering skyscrapers. One end of Zuccotti leads to Broadway, the other toward the World Trade Center. This was once the site of Occupy Wall Street. Now it’s the site of hungry New Yorkers. A mother holds open a Happy Meal for her son as they walk down Broadway. The boy periodically reaches his hand into the red and yellow cardboard box to retrieve some fries.
Zuccotti Park's seating labels used to encourage social distancing measures.
Smoothie King, bubble tea and Hhana Hhazan food trucks are parked on the square. The Indian King Biryani House Food truck, outside of Brown Brothers Harriman, often boasts a line of businessmen standing patiently while checking their phones, rain or shine.
Zuccotti Park is filled with concrete benches, concrete chairs and concrete tables. Touches of greenery embellished with lights for the holidays decorate the otherwise sleek but drab cafeteria. Before the pandemic — what feels like a lifetime ago but is actually early March — lunch-goers navigated to the park to grab a quick bite, socialize and take in the pulse of the bustling city. Now, metal barricades bar the area and seating is branded with blue, weather-proof stickers instructing whether to sit there or not, depending on infection rates and city guidance. It’s inconvenient, yes, but all of the fuss is to encourage social distancing.
King's Junior Montgomery Drumm eats in Zuccotti Park while socially distanced from others.
Montgomery Drumm, a junior at The King’s College located nearby at Broadway and Exchange Place, walks into the park with his Sticky’s food bag in hand. His choice of the day: a chicken sandwich with fries. He finds a table, sits down, takes off his mask and prepares to enjoy his meal.
Drumm doesn’t clean the table, but he isn’t the only one; not many come to Zuccotti Park strapped with Clorox wipes. Is this indicative of a lack of fear of the Coronavirus? Or is it because the park doesn’t provide cleaning resources? Either way, lunch-goers have to hope for the best.
A nurse on her lunch break eats food she brought from home, construction workers chow down on some McDonalds and a businessman leans against one of the park’s benches reading a book and drinking an afternoon Coke. The birds chirp, a landscaper blows leaves around before being told to come back later and the browning leaves from the surrounding trees fall into people’s food as they sweep down to the ground.
Staten Island Ferry
Further downtown outside the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, more people seem to smoke cigarettes for lunch rather than eating food. Among the few lunch eaters is a man in a tuxedo, a green ball cap and black Nike sneakers. He carries his white plastic takeout bag to a bench. He mumbles under his breath, praying over his meal.
The 1:30 p.m. boat arrives. The tuxedoed man makes his way to get in a line, which is an Amoeba-like clump of 100 or so lunch-goers and tourists, aka Dr. Anthony Fauci’s nightmare.
The terminal smells like Auntie Anne’s and original New York human perspiration, aka B.O.
An hour passes. The kiosks slow down. The blue-uniformed sanitation crews sweep the benches and the floors; workers in the restaurant booth wipe their foreheads, check their phones and tiredly lean up against the wall.
The lunch hour aftermath looks the same at the ferry terminal as it did before the pandemic; litter covers the ground. The only thing that looks different is the medical blue disposable masks left among the brown paper bags, coffee cups and cigarette butts on the concrete.
Puttering Along at Pret
Kelsey Logan (left) and Abby Prior (right) had Tacombi for lunch and both agreed that COVID hasn’t really affected their lunchtimes at all because their favorites are still open!
Pret A Manger caters to an office-working demographic as well as many King’s staff and students as it’s located in the same block of buildings as the college. The convenient shelves stacked with sandwiches, salads and soups at Pret is designed as a quick place to grab lunch or make a coffee run. The restaurant even commits itself to getting customers in-and-out the door in 60 seconds.
The saving grace for restaurants like Pret during the pandemic is their trademark service: coffee.
What seems to have prevented the chain from closing locations - according to reports in The New York Times - is partly a new system that awards people who frequent Pret every day: Subscription customers. Perhaps taking a page from the playbook of Netflix, Hulu and Spotify, the new coffee pass charges $10 a month for members to get basic coffee at no additional cost. For $20 a month, members can get a premium pass that allows the option of espresso or any coffee of their choosing.
Voices on Reddit speculate that Pret A Manger is taking a slight loss by introducing their popular coffee pass. One Reddit user theorizes that they are willing to take the loss of giving out unlimited coffee on a subscription just to get people in the store to potentially buy a sandwich or wrap.
One of the cashiers, who asked to remain anonymous, said that business during lunch is picking up more and more every month. “It’s really nice that it’s getting busier,” she said. “It was kind of scary for a little bit.”
Wall Sweetgreen
At Sweetgreen on Wall Street, another Fi-Di lunch hour hot spot, customers follow the green lettuce stamps on the sidewalk like a trail of breadcrumbs that lead inside.
The words “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter” hang on the white wall; “fall” is lit up by white neon lights. Tables for two that once occupied five people, five salads and five glasses of the restaurant’s homemade tea and lemonade, are corralled in the far corner, roped off from customer use. A few employees on their lunch break munch and chat around these tables. There is no longer a fresh batch of the restaurant’s natural tea or lemonade brewing in the corner; the metallic water and small-cubed ice machines are turned off as well.
A Sweetgreen employee named Elton compared the current business at the salad spot’s Wall Street location to pre-pandemic: “Before the virus, an individual employee made 30 to 40 salads per every 30 minutes during the rush hour for lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.,” he said. “Now, the line moves at a slower pace, serving a maximum of five people in the store at a time” because of social distancing guidelines.
Popular FiDi lunch spot, Sweetgreen is shown boarded up with a big sign alerting customers that the salad restaurant is still open. The lunch hour rush line used to flow out of the front door pre-pandemic.
Before the pandemic, customers could hardly fit in the store during the lunch rush. A line of 50 to 100 customers sometimes wrapped, twisted and wriggled around the dining area in every way possible, and those at the back of the pack waited outside.
Elton described the change from overwhelming in-store traffic every weekday for lunch to its present socially-distanced state. “Before the Coronavirus, it was incredibly difficult to traffic through the doors because people were coming in and out constantly to place in-store orders or to pick up online orders,” he said. “Now our lunch hour primarily consists of online orders.”
Fighting to Stay In Business
Some small businesses have been hit hard by COVID-19. West Bank Deli, a 23-year-old, family-owned grocery store relied on its local customers to stay afloat. “We are part of the fabric of this community,” said Daniel Lamorte, partial owner of West Bank. “There are so many people who have lived here for a long time or worked down here for many years, and they say ‘Hey what’s up, Dani? How ya doin’...’”
“It’s still not great but we’re holding our own,” Lamorte said. “If you want to come in and get a chicken parm at 5:30 in the morning, we’ll make you a chicken parm at 5:30 in the morning—we’re here to do it. The lights are on, the door is open, we’re ready to serve you.”
Other food service workers do not share Lamorte’s optimism.
Elvis Vicente, manager at the Juice Generation in the Fi-Di, said there were 20 Juice Generation locations in New York pre-pandemic. Roughly 70% of the chain’s stores closed down because of the pandemic. Now, only six locations remain in the city, his being one of them. In May, Vicente saw the Financial District as a ghost town; during the height of the pandemic only around 10% of his regular flow of customers came in. Since then, he says the flow had gone up to 40%.
Vicente said his crew at Juice Generation clean the entire store every hour (which he noted they have time for because it's slow) and he takes extensive care of his employees when they show any symptoms. They check employees for a fever at the start of their shift and never hesitate to send an employee home. If an employee shows symptoms they must get tested. Even if they test negative, they are asked to stay home, get re-tested in another few days and then remain home until the symptoms go away.
He knows that his employees are afraid of coming into work during the COVID-19 storm, but he knows they have no other choice.
“If they could afford their bills without working, they wouldn’t do it,” Vicente said.
At Joe and the Juice, Molly Minter and Nia Mayfield, two college student employees, express similar frustrations.
“I’m putting my life at risk to make you a latte!” Minter said
Mayfield added, “I’m getting paid minimum wage to steam your milk!” she said. “Fucking tip!”
Because of the pandemic, people are using delivery services more according to Salvador Martinez, a young immigrant from Guerrero, Mexico. He used to work at Greenwich Treehouse, a bar that now links its GoFundMe on its Instagram page. He started working at Doordash over a year ago and finds that in the current economy, he has no other choice.
“Everyone is turning to delivery apps,” Martinez said in between bites of his breakfast torta. He felt fewer people were ordering food delivery, meaning he interacts with even few people than he did before. “[The pandemic] has made a lonely job even lonelier.”