Dr. Robert Snyder is the Manhattan Borough Historian and Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Journalism at Rutgers. He spoke with the Amsterdam News about his upcoming book, the role of a borough historian, and the COVID-19 pandemic. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
AmNews: What are your duties as Manhattan borough historian? One of my duties is to create an archive for the City of New York that had been established long before I arrived on the scene. Another [is] to advocate for historic preservation that’s already being done by lots of preservationists in New York City. Third, which I thought I could do best of all, is educate people about history. I try to do that in a variety of ways. I try to help scholars who are researching the history of New York City about the city in a way that is more accessible to general readers.
I try to help journalists who are covering the city develop a richer understanding of history behind the headlines that they see today. I try to promote good books that are being written about the history of New York City. I do interviews for the New Books Network and the Gotham Center for New York City History with authors of books on New York and Manhattan in particular, and I do lectures for different organizations and local libraries.
One of the things that impressed me most about New York’s response to the pandemic was how people in the professional world that I’m in, which is mostly historians, documentarians, archivists, folklorists, [was] how much they grasp that this was really big. The pandemic was going to be huge and it would be important for New York City and we’d want to understand it in the future. They really went to work and collected everything from oral history interviews, photographs of works of art, and archived them in all sorts of ways so that future generations could understand and interpret [them].
We were baffled that the 1918 flu epidemic had hit New York City and nobody remembered it. I didn’t learn about it until I interviewed my grandmother. When I was in college in the 1970s, I was interviewing her about her life in New York City and she just said it in passing. I was just astonished to learn about the 1918 flu and nobody had talked about it. It was as if it had never happened. It occurred in the middle of World War I and there were tons of World War I memorials all over the place but you have to look hard to figure out that there was a flu epidemic in 1918. I resolved that I would do what I could to make sure that what happened during the COVID pandemic in New York City was not forgotten.
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AmNews: You have a new book coming out called When the City Stopped which tells the story of COVID-19 through the words of regular New Yorkers. Tell us about it.
A lot of the people interviewed in the book are first responders and medical professionals who worked during the pandemic, talking about their experience. What I discovered editing the interviews is that as difficult as the spring of 2020 was, that was where people were finding ways to be brave, where they were summoning sources of solidarity that they weren’t fully aware of beforehand. Where they were learning to reinvent their jobs to be more effective health care providers. We can learn a lot from that, I think. We can find inspiration in the solidarity of medical professionals and first responders and just ordinary folks who suddenly found their jobs as supermarket cashiers, as food delivery workers [dangerous]. . . facing death so the rest of us could go on with semi-normal lives.
AmNews: What are some of the takeaways for you in writing the book?
One of the takeaways is that I knew that New York City had gotten more and more unequal. In 2019 I published a book about immigration in New York City and that was one of the big themes of economic inequality, the way that affects the lives of immigrants and migrants, but to me the pandemic in the uneven distribution of deaths, just showed how unequal the city has become.
Another takeaway is to recognize that each New Yorker’s health and safety is bound up with the health and safety of every other New Yorker. [During] the pandemic, we all faced a common threat and we must come to recognize that protecting ourselves also involves protecting others. You know we have to become our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.