'No one cared': 5 years on, the pandemic still cuts deep for some city workers

“We were here.” So told MTA bus operator Re’gan Weal to Robert Snyder, the Manhattan borough historian.

“We were here risking our lives, our families, while everyone else was home,” Weal related to Snyder in March 2023, who at the time undertook a chronicle of the dark days that descended on the city during the Covid pandemic’s early weeks and months. “I would just like people to remember that we were here.” 

While most residents sheltered indoors nearly around the clock, and the city’s avenues, stores and restaurants were desolate for weeks and even shuttered for good beginning in March 2020, most municipal services by and large were kept functioning. The workers doing those jobs, along with the thousands of doctors, nurses and other clinicians, many laboring around the clock, were newly tagged “essential.” 

But reflecting some three years later about the pandemic's early days, Weal lamented that in March and April 2020 few acknowledged his work or that of his transit worker colleagues, 136 of whom would die from the virus by January 2021. 

“No one cared when it came to us,” he told Snyder. “We didn’t receive the respect we deserved.” 

Weal is one of 43 people whose testimonies are included in Snyder’s new book, “When The City Stopped: Stories from New York’s Essential Workers” (Cornell). The book is an oral history, an amalgamation of various history and remembrance projects launched by academics and cultural organizations in 2020 to document the experiences of New Yorkers in the rapidly changing city. 

Snyder combined those projects, including poems, works of literature and testimonies, and conducted additional interviews, such as with Weal, to ensure the full spectrum of workers in New York City was included.  

Snyder, who for two decades taught journalism and American studies at Rutgers, said he decided to write the book to honor and highlight those who risked their lives to keep the city afloat. He said he sensed residents and public officials owe them a great debt of gratitude. 

"The essential workers set a particularly good example for the rest of us in the hardest days of the pandemic,” Snyder told The Chief recently. "They kept the city running while the rest of us stayed at home and sheltered to survive and I think they deserve enormous credit." 

Snyder focused on transit workers who, like Weal, he feels were largely taken for granted as New Yorkers who ensured those other workers deemed essential could get to their jobs. He said he was “shocked” at the numbers of transit workers who died of Covid. And he is “furious” that officials essentially ignored bus and train operators’ safety concerns in those early months. 

The dangers of forgetting

The historian said his focus on transit workers was rooted in a familial connection: his grandfather was a transit worker who was employed as a conductor and a towerman from World War I into the 1960s. 

But Snyder’s book records the thoughts and sentiments of workers across occupations and industries: firefighters, police officers, doctors, teachers, nurses and delivery workers, among others. It also includes reflections from New Yorkers who weren’t essential workers about how their lives changed because of the pandemic.  

A book by Manhattan Borough Historian Robert Snyder highlights the lifesaving work of essential workers in New York at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Cornell University Press

Snyder suggests that solidarity was one of the most “prominent themes” he came across in his interviews. “There was much of this in COVID-19, from the people who sewed protective masks when they were in desperately short supply to the young people who helped their elders wrangle vaccine appointments from badly designed vaccine registration websites,” he writes in the book’s introduction.

Speaking with The Chief, Snyder noted another talking point he repeatedly heard from workers: a profound dislike of President Donald Trump, who in the spring of 2020 was in the third year of his first term.

"The consistent theme that came through those interviews, particularly in 2020, was how angry people were at Donald Trump for letting the city down,” he said. “They felt that his leadership was thoroughly inadequate and that they were being left to die because people in New York City had voted the wrong way." 

Trump’s return to the White House, Snyder said, was a sign that New Yorkers, and Americans, chose to forget the worst of the pandemic when the city’s streets were silent but for the wail of ambulances, the whir of garbage trucks and the idling of freezer trucks storing bodies outside of hospitals.  

Five years on, Snyder hopes that his work helps remind people of the pandemic’s worst days and of those workers, many of them true heroes, who kept at their tasks when the city came to a halt.

“It’s a trauma and [people] want to forget it,” Snyder said. “But I think the danger is if we forget too much of it, we don't learn anything from it, and if we don't learn anything from it we’re disarmed the next time we have to confront something like this.” 

"We're not yet done with the pandemic,” he continued. "The experiences of the pandemic, although forgotten by many people, still inform how we think, feel and vote." 

dfreeman@thechiefleader.com