Months Later, Some New Yorkers Are Still Banging Pots to Thank Frontline Workers
3 min readSept. 28, 2021 — When the coronavirus pandemic locked down the nation’s major city in the spring of 2020, New Yorkers flocked to their home windows to bang their pots and pans and yell their thanks to health treatment workers and to start with responders for saving a town ravaged by COVID-19.

But as the pandemic wore on, and lots of succumbed to disaster tiredness, the whoops and hollers for the wellness treatment employees slowed, replaced by the regular sounds of honking cars and trucks and chatty pedestrians. But 18 months later, some of the faithful are nonetheless saluting these heroes, writes Darcie Wilder in this Gawker piece.

This nightly ritual has ongoing in neighborhoods during the metropolis, like nightly renditions of “God Bless America” on the Higher West Aspect and sounds-earning minutes in Hell’s Kitchen area, a New York Town neighborhood that bore much of the brunt of the pandemic. This is also the community that saw the arrival of the USNS Comfort ship on the Hudson River and, months later, the opening of the Javits Middle as a mass vaccination web-site for spot citizens.

“I imagine it is attractive and heartwarming that they’re out there every night,” states Aleta LaFargue, an actor who life in Hell’s Kitchen. “We’re not out of the storm, and people are even now getting unwell, so I feel it’s definitely great that there’s this gratitude and a reminder of what is heading on out there in the metropolis and in the environment.”



Inquire Gail Saltz, MD, a medical affiliate professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Clinic, the host of the “How Can I Assistance?” podcast from iHeartRadio, and a New Yorker herself. She says there’s a little something incredibly positive about continuing this nightly custom.

“If cheering will help you feel like you are carrying out something beneficial in the facial area of a lot of helplessness in the pandemic, then indeed, that’s healthful for your head,” she claims. “If cheering provides you a feeling of gratitude for health and fitness treatment personnel and other helpers, then which is also healthful.”

It also feels excellent to abide by via on a assure.

“For us in New York City, it is this concept of, ‘OMG these vital employees, the hospitals are comprehensive, we won’t be ready to repay them for what they did for us,’” states Phil O’Brien, editor and publisher of W42ST, a each day publication and site. “I admire individuals who have the specific function to don’t forget this when it would be so significantly less difficult to let life get in the way.”

Continuing to do a 7 p.m. shout-out might also be therapeutic, provided stress-making headlines and relating to COVID-19 numbers and stats.

“The pandemic is ongoing, so executing factors that assistance you to sense fewer nervous, to improve your mood and to get support — even though sustaining security — is all continue to critical,” Saltz says.

Eventually, for lots of New Yorkers, the target is the very same: To under no circumstances forget.

“It’s uncomplicated in our lifestyle to encounter some atrocity and then, a 7 days afterwards, we’re on to the following detail,” LaFargue says. “This ritual is banging you in the head to remind you that this [isn’t] above. There is a value to that.”

