New York shines on

The Big Apple is buzzing, with new hotels, revived restaurants, and a fresh attitude

- SUNSHINE FLINT

There were moments in the past two years that made it hard to believe the pandemic would ever pass. The city's streets were empty, the storefronts dark, and our nights were spent clapping for healthcare workers, with the noise a helpful reminder that our neighbours had been there all along. Thankfully those difficult months are truly a thing of the past. The throngs of people on the sidewalk, in parks, at restaurants, and snarling the city streets and highways with cars they bought during the pandemic, not to mention skyrocketing residential rents, show that New Yorkers, myself included, didn't abandon ship. New York is back and open for business.

OFFICE SPACE

For those that miss it dearly, let me remind you of the jolt you get when you lift your head from the gridded streets of Manhattan or spy the cinematic skyline from the new observation decks at the World Trade Center or One Vanderbilt. Block after block of glass-and-steel towers rise higher and higher from Midtown to Queens to Brooklyn, with 80-, 90-, even 100-storey skyscrapers dwarfing the 20th-century twins of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Construction is the city's lifeblood, from the new towers of Hudson Yards on Manhattan's far West Side to the spindled tops of the residential buildings along 57th Street and downtown Brooklyn.

Some of these towers partially emptied during the pandemic, and commercial real estate felt the sting. The office vacancy rate in Manhattan was 17 per cent at the end of 2021 compared with 11 per cent in 2019. This coincided with a jump in work-from-home positions to 10.6 per cent of job openings, or 25,800 of 243,000 postings for December 2021. By comparison, in early 2020 only 4 per cent of job postings were remote.