Beautiful Short Film Looks Back at Empty NYC in Early Pandemic

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, the world was fascinated with the imagery of New York City eerily empty. The sudden change was shocking even for New Yorkers, but seen as a sign of the city’s collective effort to flatten the curve—a phrase that no longer needs quotation marks around it.

We originally posted this film in June of 2020, when the warm weather brought New Yorkers out of self-isolation. Photographs of a packed Christopher Street pier in Greenwich Village sparked outrage, particularly in contrast with the viral video of NYPD officers violently arresting people in the East Village and other locales. The near-summer heat encouraged people to mosey into cars that had been indefinitely parked on the city streets and head to the beach. Traffic, from our observation, was looking more like pre-pandemic levels.

All of that pent up rage of a populace confined for nearly eight weeks was boiling over. It made the footage of the early pandemic seem almost quaint and vintage. As such, it was timely for Unforgotten Films, known for its haunting video on Hart Island and other “inaccessible” landscapes in New York City, to release “Unforgotten Minute — PAUSE NYC.” It shows sites like Grand Central Terminal, Times Square, the Broadway Theater District, World Trade Center Oculus, Penn Station, Wall Street, Prospect Park, Coney Island, the New York City subway, and various neighborhoods virtually empty of activity. It was the first video in a new series called Unforgotten Minute, a short visual format that will allow the Unforgotten team to share more of our city’s under-appreciated landscapes, in response to current events.

We are sharing this video again at the five-year anniversary of New York City's COVID-19 lockdown. The film features photographs shot by Untapped New York's Artist-in-Residence Aaron Asis during the early days of the pandemic. He wandered empty streets and transit hubs, and iconic sites like Rockefeller Center and the Brooklyn Bridge.